Almost every kid I meet has an allergy of some kind. They may even proudly show off the epipen they carry to inject themselves against the anaphylactic shock that will come on if they swallow a lurking pistachio.
Modern kids are allergic to milk, nuts, eggs, wheat, carpet dust and animal dander. Young parents, fearing that Baby will develop an allergy, are omitting milk, nuts, eggs and wheat from their diets and carpets and animals from their homes.
So instead of allergies, today’s kids are suffering from semi-starvation, cold floors and lack of animal companionship, but at least Mom and Dad feel that they are bringing up a healthy kid.
Wrong. Actually, researchers have made a surprising discovery: when kids are denied foods that sometimes trigger allergies, they actually develop more allergies than kids who are given small amounts of those things all along.
I think the way it works is that when the body finally is introduced to a peanut, an egg, a bowl of ice cream or a hotdog bun after years of never digesting one, it says, “Hey! I’ve never dealt with this before. Must be an enemy!” And it shoots out its little defender cells that attack the peanut but make the kid very sick.
And every kid will be introduced to such forbidden foods when he starts to school, if not before. What kid can watch his friends eating a Reese’s or a hotdog loaded with red dye on a refined wheat bun and not want to trade his tofu square for it?
The same thing is true with animals and carpets. At some point Junioretta is going to encounter a scruffy dog or a dusty rug, and then, boom! Breakout the epipen!
Both of my grandsons had food allergies. The older one had to have a gluten-free cake at this first birthday party. Now, at age 18, he eats mac and cheese with a side of mac and cheese. He is the king of gluten.
The younger one had even more difficulties. He was allergic to cow’s milk so they put him on soy milk. I didn’t know you could milk a soy, but there you go. Then he was allergic to soy. Then came goat’s milk and finally rice milk, which worked, though rice, too, is hard to milk. He had an epipen.
As he got to pre-school and began trading his rice milk for snicker doodle cookies and Eskimo pies, all the allergies went away.
In both cases, exposure to the offending food seemed to have beaten the allergy. I’m not urging you to start force-feeding peanut butter to you highly allergic toddler. But I am saying that maybe we’re being too careful.
It’s the same way with dirt. Parents are so terrified of a germ attacking Junior that they overdo the wipes and the bleach and the disinfectant spray. As with food, when Junior finally does get up close and personal with a germ or a dog hair on grandma’s floor, he goes down like the Titanic.
That must be why I never had an allergy, and I have always been reasonably healthy—my parents knew little about allergies or germs, so they gave me anything I was willing to eat and kept me outside playing a lot.
Between the ages of 3 and 7, when little humans begin to gain control over their own hygiene, I washed my hands maybe twice. If the dirt was comfortable and didn’t come off on my red-dye loaded weiner, I kept wearing it until I took a bath, which took some forcing.
And I didn’t sit around pecking on an iPad screen all day either. That’s a very sanitary-looking activity that occupies kids today, keeping them clean but turning lots of them into overweight wimps.
I was serious about dirt, which I thought smelled divine. I made mud pies, dug for worms and panned for gold in what I now realize was a drainage ditch that ran through our neighborhood.
I grew up in a pack of my grandfather’s hunting dogs. I would play among them for hours, getting pawed, licked in the face and rolled on. The only cleaning those dogs ever got was when they couldn’t get under the house fast enough in a rainstorm or when Grandmother threw a pan of dirty dishwater off the back porch onto a couple of them.
Instead of my parents panicking over lurking allergies, the only warning Dad ever gave me was “Don’t let that dog lick you in the mouth! You don’t know what he’s been eating!” Actually, I did know, but I didn’t let that deter me from socializing with my favorite creatures.
And my mother’s only warning was “Be sure you don’t swallow a dog hair! It will turn into a worm!”
They yelled about my canine company, but nobody ever stopped me, because none of the adults were willing to wade into a pack of snarling dogs to extract me, and I wouldn’t come out until I got ready. I got scratched plenty of times and bitten by fleas, but I never had a germ infestation or an allergy from it. And I never got worms.
I’m not a doctor, but I think good doses of peanut butter, dog hair, carpet dust and a limit on screen time may just be what keeps a kid healthy.
