Comedy act targets over-concerned yuppie mummies… and rightly so.
9 05 2008The funny thing about comedians and their acts is that often they take a serious truth and turn it into something we can all laugh about. You can insult almost anyone, and anything, if its delivered in just the right manner. I recently caught a comedian on CBC whose routine was so funny- and so true- that I’m still thinking about it! The truth is, some of todays parents are doing more harm than good with their ridiculous, ill-conceived and over protective parenting methods.
For example,he touched on the benefits of dirt for your health - or more succinctly, how modern kids don’t even know what dirt is ! As he pointed out, playgrounds are almost sterile areas in todays societies,and to top it off, behind every little designer clad kid is a well- heeled yuppie mummy with a bottle of Purel alcoholic hand sanitizer. Did you ever wonder how your immune system is developed? Exposure to germs and bacteria!!Your body has to learn to build a defense, and if you kill every germ or bacteria in sight, before your immune system learns how to handle it…… Well, lets just say that the poor kids whose mums and dads prevent them from ever coming into contact with any germs are doing way more harm than good.
People!!! Dirt is good, dirt is fun!! Kids NEED dirt!!!
When I grew up, I spent a good deal of time playing in the dirt with my brother, catching frogs and tadpoles in the pond down the street, and generally having what I would consider, normal childhood. We washed our hands before eating - most of the time, but I can guarantee you that I probably ingested more than most kids actually touch nowadays… and I have a distinct memory of my brother daring me to eat a worm.
Needless to say, I didn’t die of some horrible soil-borne pathogen,and I didn’t contract any strange diseases , nor did I get any kind of food-poisoning or intestinal parasites. I did , however, have a hell of a lot of fun, and learned that worms taste kind of gritty when you eat them right out of the garden…
Parents freak out about everything now, and it shows in the products parents by. For every kind of surface a kid might touch, there’s a product to cover it, or a germ killer to sanitize it. Your kids got a cough? Better run to the old doc and get some antibiotics. You might as well raise your kid in a freaking bubble, if that’s the route you are going to go.
Think about it- why are so many illnesses that were previously normal parts of childhood becoming killers? Viruses are mutating and bacteria are getting stronger and more resistant to the remedies we have. We, as a population, have done it to ourselves. Most of you know I have three kids. My older two had all the normal kid illnesses- chicken pox, colds, occasional flu. A little snotty nose over the winter. Rarely did they ever have antibiotics for anything that I can recall. Hot tea and lemon with honey, Vicks vaporub, and some extra love from mom was the cure for everything.
My youngest one, however, in only three and already has had cellulitis. Cellulitis! I had never even heard of it before he developed it, but its one of those bacterial infections that has become resistant to certain drugs, and it has returned already once. Great, I think, he’s only three and already he’s run into something that could mean problems down the road. I place all the blame on these medically resistant bugs on people like those yuppie parents who kill every germ in sight, and run for meds whenever their child gets a fever. I blame the doctors who hand out the meds like they are candy, finding it easier to appease a cranky patients demands rather than refuse to give them something that wont help a bit. We’ve done well at creating a plethora of drug resistant strains of bacteria that are killing people everyday.
Why cant we go back to the way it was? What is everyone so scared of? If there is one thing I could tell a new parent , it would be to relax. Just relax. Let your child enjoy being a child. Geesh, when I grew up, we didn’t have bike helmets or knee pads. We didn’t even have seatbelts or car seats- although I do think its great we do have them now. Take your kid to the country, and let him or her dig in the garden. Show them worms and spiders and bugs and anything else that crawls by. Let them eat without sterilizing their hands first. We didn’t use Purel and if we dropped a cookie on the ground, we would just wipe it off and eat it anyways.
A little dirt never killed anyone, my dad used to say.
It is the age of “what can you do for me”, “instant gratification”, and “it is somebody else’s fault”.