If you prefer to listen rather than read, this blog is available as a podcast here. Or if you want to listen to just this post:
When I was a kid, I had never heard of someone with a peanut allergy. The first time I encountered the condition I was in college, and it wasn’t someone I knew. It was the friend of a friend of a friend. Enough removed that these days you’d wonder, upon first hearing of it, if the condition was made up. But those were more credulous times, and I never doubted that someone could be so allergic to something that if they ate it they would die. But it did seem fantastic. These days I’m sure you know someone with a peanut allergy. My daughter isn’t allergic to peanuts, she’s allergic to tree nuts, and carries an epipen with her wherever she goes.
The primary theory for this change, how we went from no allergies of this sort to lots of them, is the hygiene hypothesis. The idea is that in the “olden days” children were exposed to enough pathogens, parasites and microorganisms that their immune system had plenty to keep it occupied, but now we live in an environment which is so sterile that the immune system, lacking actual pathogens, overreacts to things like peanuts. (Obviously this is a vast oversimplification.)
As the parent of someone who suffers from a dangerous allergy, I feel guilty. I don’t think we went overboard on cleanliness. Certainly we weren’t constantly spraying down surfaces with disinfectant, or repeatedly washing with antibacterial soap. Nevertheless, it appears that we failed to stress her immune system in the way it needed to be—that somewhere in the course of trying to make her safer we actually made her life more dangerous.
Does this idea—that certain amounts of stress are necessary for healthy development—need to be applied more broadly? Do we need to add a psychological hygiene hypothesis to the physical one? I would argue that we do. That it’s not just children’s immune systems which are designed around certain stressors, but that everything involved in their development needs a certain amount of risk to mature properly.
We see a dawning acknowledgement of this idea in things like the Free-Range Parenting movement, which, among other things, wants to make sure kids can walk, unaccompanied, to and from school, and the local park, without having child protective services called. The free-range argument is that kids need to get out and experience the world. Which presumably means experiencing some danger. If you want to get more technical, the theory underlying all of these efforts is that kids are antifragile and they get stronger when exposed to stress, up to a point. But is having them walk alone to school enough “stress”? When I was 8 I wasn’t just walking to school alone I was wandering for hours in the foothills, and climbing cliffs. These days I’m not sure that would be labeled “free-range parenting”, I think it might still be labeled neglect. It wasn’t, but where do you draw the line?
In the past a parent could do everything in their power to protect their kids, and they would still experience an abundance of suffering, danger, and stress, enough that no one ever worried whether they might be getting “enough”. But after centuries of progress we’ve finally reached the point where it’s reasonable to ask if we’ve gone too far. Particularly when we have young adults who, historically, would have been raising families or fighting in wars instead declaring that certain ideas are so harmful that they should not be uttered.
For those parenting in a modern, developed country, this problem is one of the central paradoxes of parenting, perhaps THE central paradox. And it’s not just parents that face this paradox, educators and even employers are facing it as well. Unfortunately I don’t have any easy solutions to offer.
As I mentioned I was wandering in the foothills of Utah when I was 8, but it’s not as if this experience made me into some kind of superman. I’m still at best only half the man my father is, and he’d probably tell you he’s only half the man his father was. All of which is to say, if this is indeed the trend, I’m unconvinced that a small amount of stress, or a few challenges, or a small course correction is all that’s required to fix the problem.
This would leave us with a very difficult problem: We’ve demonstrated the power to eliminate suffering, do we have the wisdom to bring it back?
The punchline of me wandering in the foothills when I was 8, is that I was nearly always accompanied by my cousin who would have been 5 or 6. So if stories of brave kindergartners is your thing, consider donating, I might have more of them.
I think more wealth is the answer. “More dakka”, if you want. What we need is not real danger, but the illusion of, the simulation of. Which is admittedly an order more magnitude more danger than just letting children go to school alone – you have to create an environment where they can roam by themselves… but still always be in an environment where the maximum damage is limited (you’re not interested in scraped knees – if anything you want them – you’re just interested in keeping things at scraped knee level, with a 100% certitude).
Interesting point, and I suppose I agree in principle, but it sounds difficult to pull off. I’m not personally much into sports myself, but lots of people swear they provide exactly the challenge I’m talking about, and yeah, 99% of the time (depending on the sport) they’re in the category you describe, you’re injured but there is no long term consequence. And then 1% of the time you permanently damage something—your knee or your shoulder or whatever are never the same. So how does more wealth turn something like sports, into something where there is no possibility of a permanent injury. Or are you okay with anything short of death?
Is it that allergies have increased, or is it that our awareness of them has increased? In ye olden days, before people knew what allergies were, I can imagine people with food allergies would die quickly, with their passing being written off as unexplained or attributed to something completely different. Nowadays, with longer life expectancies, modern medical knowledge, and a higher population (meaning a greater ratio of people with food allergies), we are much more alert for these kind of things.
Regarding free range kids vs. neglect, I think the difference is that the parents of free-range kids expect their kids to tell them where they are going, when they expect to be back, and who they are with. Said kids should also have “stranger danger” training, and have their address and home phone number memorized. Neglectful parents are those that don’t know or care where their kid is or what they are doing.
Sure, in the “olden days” something like that might have passed without any connection being made, but I think medicine was advanced enough that we would have picked it up in the post-war era. And yet as I pointed out when I was growing up in the 70’s and 80’s I had never heard of anything like that.
Also, while I haven’t done any kind of survey, my sense is that the hygiene hypothesis is pretty widely accepted, even if the exact mechanism is still in dispute. But you have stuff like this:
https://www.asthma.org.uk/about/media/news/press-release-worms-could-cure-asthma-new-study-shows/ (the 30 second google answer)
Sure, neglect takes many forms, and perhaps I should have stuck with danger. Sure they’re not neglectful, but even if you teach your kids about “stranger danger” they’re going to be in less danger from strangers if you’re there than if you’re not. So the question becomes balancing the benefits of independence with the additional danger that comes from allowing that independence.
I consulted the WANS science advisor and he added:
“Yes actual incidence has increased. How do we know? 1. Severity as a percentage of cases is higher than in the past. 2. Number of hospitalizations and deaths consistently increases.”