What would happen to a kid if he got absolutely no exercise at all–just sat (or lay) around all the time?
Well, it’s pretty obvious: Some parts of him (like his muscles) would underdevelop while other parts of him (like his waistline) would overdevelop.
Kids, like people in general, need exercise. God designed us so that we need to work out to grow properly.
That’s why God gave kids the instinct to gain excitement (before the invention of TV and video games) by going outdoors and running around (in packs) and playing and wrestling and rolling around.
In the dirt.
And getting cuts and scrapes.
Which the dirt gets in.
Now this is the part that drives a lot of contemporary American parents wild with worry. Cuts? Scrapes? Dirt? In? Don’t you know that dirt has viruses and bacteria and parasites in it???
But wait: Maybe that’s part of the plan.
God designed children (and the rest of us) to live a rambunctious–and dirty–existence, not to waltz around in a sterile Star Trek-like environment. That’s why he gave us an immune system.
But maybe, just like kids in general need exercise, so do their imune systems. And if their immune systems don’t get the workout they were designed to have, what then? It might seem reasonable to suppose that some aspects of their immune system would underdevelop (leaving them vulnerable to one set of maladies) and other aspects of it would overdevelop–leading to . . . leading to . . .
Allergies.
At least according to one prominent theory, known (unsurprisingly) as the hygiene hypothesis, the excessive (by historical standards) hygiene has been imposed on children of late have led part of their immune systems to overdevelop.
The result is that their immune system is like a bunch of soldiers itching for a fight. When they aren’t given something that’s a real threat to fight, they get trigger-happy and start going after things that aren’t real threats. Hence, non-threatening things like pollen, dust, and mold trigger the same kind of symptoms our bodies experience when it really is sick (like sneezing, wheezing, coughing, being congested, and having to blow your nose).
This is a theory of allergies (and the allergic disease asthma) which is known (unsurprisingly) as the hygiene hypothesis.
It’s no slouch of a theory. It seems that there has been a notable rise in levels of allergies and asthma in the developed world. This appears not just to be an illusion created by greater reporting in recent years, for there is a lesser incidence of allergies in the Third World and in the rural areas of the developed world, where kids have more access to outside play in the dirt than in urban centers.
It’s not 100% certain that the hygiene hypothesis is true. The observed effect could be due to another cause. We’ll probably know in the next couple of decades.
In the meantime, you may want to let your small children run around outside and roll around in the dirt.
Unless they’re already addicted to indoor pursuits, that’s what their instincts are telling them to do.
“God designed children (and the rest of us) to live a rambunctious–and dirty–existence.”
Jimmy, you and your highfalutin 19th-century frontier vocabulary!
Magnum bonum!
So George Carlin was right – I shouldn’t wash my hands every time.
>:-o
What about the other theory, air pollution, which would also explain rises in urban areas and
lower amounts in rural areas?
I’m open, but folks already complain (sometimes) about the lengths of my blog entries, so I can only treat one such theory at a time. Thus I noted expressly that this one ain’t a certainty–yet.
I have also read that children who grow up with dogs and cats have fewer overall allergies as adults.
You have a correlation without a proven causal linkage.
If the ‘let the children get sick and parasitized’ group were allowed to dictate things, perhaps you would have healthier humans, although rather fewer would survive to adulthood than do today. My grandparents’ generation saw quite a few childhood deaths in each family. Par for the course pre-sulfa drugs and antibiotics.
Jimmy,
I grew up with cats and dogs in close contact on the farm. Guess what I am now very allergic to?
If I’d been one hundred years earlier I would not have survived childhood, like several of my grandfather’s siblings.
The dirt-prevents-allergies people might be effectively dirt-protects-from-allergic people. These Nietschian supermen wouldn’t have to deal with coughing around them so much (so gross) and the human population would be lower (a Green objective) but they would have solved the problem by killing the patient.
then why does my super-rambunctious 7 year old have horrible spring allergies? I don’t think there’s been a time in his life when he HASN’T been running around outside getting dirty, grass-stained, muddy, scraped…you know, your average boy.
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