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News for the America we remember |
I remember the state of my knees every August. Between the bicycle wrecks on the gravel driveway and the hours spent kneeling in the garden behind our house, they were a permanent shade of bruised brown. My mother didn't reach for a bottle of hand sanitizer every time I came inside for a glass of water. She didn't have any. She usually just told me to use the garden hose if I was going to track mud on her linoleum. If I had a little dirt under my fingernails when I sat down for dinner, she might send me back to the sink, but she wasn't worried that the dirt was going to kill me. |
Back then, we didn't think much about immune systems. We just thought about being bored, which was the greatest sin a kid could commit. To cure it, we went into the woods. We built forts out of fallen pine branches. We waded through creeks that probably weren't as clean as we thought they were. We made mud pies and, if we were being honest, probably tasted a few of them on a dare. We were constantly covered in the world around us, exposed to dogs, cats, dust, pollen, and every microbe the neighborhood had to offer. |
Nowadays, things look a bit different. I walk through the park and see parents chasing their toddlers with wet wipes the second the child touches a pebble. We have treated the outdoors like a giant petri dish of danger. We scrub every surface with bleach. We buy toys that are supposedly antimicrobial. We have created a bubble for our grandkids, thinking that if we keep them perfectly clean, they will stay perfectly healthy. But it turns out that the dirt was doing us a favor all along. |
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Scientists are starting to catch up to what our grandmothers knew by instinct. They call it the hygiene hypothesis. It is a fancy way of saying that a child's body needs something to fight against. Think of the immune system like a team of young recruits at a training camp. If they spend all their time sitting in a clean barracks with nothing to do, they get bored and restless. When a real threat finally shows up, they don't know how to handle it. Or worse, they start picking fights with harmless things like peanut butter or ragweed. That is how you end up with a generation where allergies and asthma are through the roof. |
Ronald Reagan grew up in a small town in Illinois, playing in the dirt and swimming in the river. He thrived on it. During the 1980s, we were still a country that valued the outdoors and weren't afraid of a little grime. We understood that strength comes from resistance. You don't get strong muscles by sitting in a chair. The same rule applies to the tiny cells that protect us from getting sick. They need the practice that comes from a little bit of backyard filth. |
There is a freedom in letting a kid get messy. When a child is allowed to dig a hole to nowhere in the backyard, they are learning that the world is a place they can touch and change. When we hover over them with a spray bottle of disinfectant, we are teaching them that the world is something to be feared. We are making them nervous. A nervous child grows into a nervous adult, and we have |
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