Once, I helped out at a church daycare, looking after eight one- to two-year-olds while their moms were at Bible study (translation: coffee and chatting, though, after learning how active toddlers can be, I was happy to help those moms get a break). One week, a woman who usually watched over the under-ones came to assist me and the (wonderful) homeschooled teenager who was my partner-in-toddler-wrangling. And she was absolutely horrified that we did not wash all the toys and spray them down with Lysol after the kids went home.
“You’re supposed to wash and spray anything that goes in a kid’s mouth or anything touched by a kid with a runny nose!” she lectured us. “What if somebody has a cold and chews on a toy and somebody else picks it up and gets their germs?!”
Well, it was winter, and at least three of the kids had runny noses at any given time, and, given that toddlers have the attention span of caffeinated gnats, if we had followed this lady’s advice we would have been washing and spraying toys nonstop, and all the rugrats would have been knocked out by Lysol vapors before their moms got midway through Leviticus.
Now my homeschooled pal and I had enough to do – one mature 14-year-old and one 26-year-old grad student are just about a match for eight toddlers, on a good day – so we just kind of nodded and went back to our usual policy of cleaning the stuff that got actual spit or mucus on it and leaving the rest alone.
What happened? The kids got colds. The 14-year-old got colds. I got colds. And you know what? Nobody died. The kids proved pretty hardy, and continued to play and toddle around and listen to stories despite their runny noses. (They did better sick than I did, actually.) And everybody’s immune systems got a little more resistant. Kids are little germ incubators simply because they haven’t caught everything that’s out there yet. Disinfect everything they get their hands on and they won’t be able to develop the antibodies they’ll need later on in life.
I thought about Lysol Lady often while reading Warwick Cairns’s How To Live Dangerously, a great little book about how we’re all a lot safer than we think we are, and how we worry far too much about catastrophes like plane crashes and terrorist attacks when what we should really be concerned about is clogging our arteries and not getting enough exercise.
The Walkodile: Are we having fun yet?
Cairns’s book is filled with such examples of nightly-news-induced paranoia as:
· The Healthy Handle, a plastic device that you can slip over those “filthy, germ-infested” shopping cart handles to protect yourself from the horror of other people’s germs
· The Walkodile, a weird chain-gang like device for multiple kids to hold onto during walks, presumably so that they don’t wander out into the road and get hit by cars. It comes complete with bright yellow reflective sashes for the kids and crossing-guard-style vests for the adults
· How 43 percent of all parents now think that children under fourteen should not be allowed out of the house alone
· The fact that a 2007 survey by Trutex, a school uniform company, revealed that 59 percent of parents expressed an interest in having electronic tracking devices embedded in their children’s uniforms
But this paranoia is unfounded, Cairns argues, delving into brain science and evolutionary psychology to explain why we go into panic mode over things that, most likely, will never cause us harm. The fearful part of our brains, he claims, is a holdover from our caveman days, when we were much more likely to be killed by acute threats like saber-toothed tigers, poisonous snakes, and warfare with rival tribes. Back then, we needed that adrenaline rush to help us fend off these dangers.
These days we’re more likely to die from heart disease (killer of 1 in 3 Americans), cancer (annual risk of death 1 in 387), and car accidents (annual risk of death 1 in 140), but we don’t give these everyday threats enough credence. Instead, when the media presents us with novel threats – swine flu, terrorist attacks, child abductions – we react in much the same way as we would if Big Ugg were standing over us, club in hand.
Do I look like Ralph Wiggum to you?
Cairns’s main point, though, is that this primitive panic reflex is causing us to live impoverished lives. This is especially true of children. Lenore Skenazy, of the blog and book Free Range Kids, writes of moms who wait with their kids at the bus stop for the school bus, housing developments that want to ban kids under 16 from playing outdoors unsupervised, parents who are afraid to let their children go on sleepovers, and a day care center where, to gain access, you must pass through a “vascular recognition system” that identifies you by the pattern of veins on the back of your hand. Skenazy, who was once vilified for letting her 9-year-old son ride the subway by himself, rightly criticizes these helicopter parents. Kids aren’t Faberge eggs, after all: they’re little human beings who need an appropriate amount of independence if they’re to thrive. And, until full-body force fields are invented, there’s no way you can keep them – or yourself — safe from every risk out there.
What to do? Use your common sense, basically. Exercise. Eat well. Drive safely. Let your kids out of your sight once in a while when they’re old enough and ready for it. And, when it comes to germs, heed the advice my beloved grandma gave me at age 5 when I pouted about getting dirt on my Popsicle: “Aw, eat it anyway. You’ll eat a peck of dirt before you die.”
