One theory is that we have quarantined our children away from nature and now they are developing allergies to it. I know it can happen for other reasons, but has anyone else noticed that many parents and kids today seem to have dirt phobia? I was in my backyard with a friend, when his child picked up a stick. He rushed over, grabbed his child's arm, removed the stick, and then looked at me with concern, asking if he should wash his son's hand.
When I was a kid I picked up sticks, laid them straight, and hurled them like javelins. I played in dirt without washing my hands before eating my Snickers. One of my favorite pastimes was filling styrofoam cups with dust and throwing them through the air like bombs which exploded in plumes upon crashing into the ground. The bigger the cup, the more dust, the bigger the mushroom clouds. I would even combine cups to increase the fun. I planted things in the dirt, gardened with my grandmother, repaired divots, laid sod, played terrible lies in sand traps, dug worms, and, like my wife, made mud pies. I also learned to filet fish as a youngster. I am not afraid of dirt, germs, slime, or guts, and I'm proud of it ( in case you couldn't tell :-). I don't get sick very often, neither do my kids, and I never carry hand sanitizer. Living close to nature has served me well. Spending most of their time indoors seems not to have helped our present generation. Lewis writes:
They began producing the damp and smeary parcels of bear-meat which would have been so very unattractive to anyone who had spent the day indoors (Prince Caspian, The Return of the Lion).
Dirt came up once in class last year (you never know what will) and "ew!" started erupting from the girls. "What?" I asked. "Dirt is gross," I heard. "Really!?!" I said, "I dare say that unless you're eating gummy bears for lunch it all came from dirt. When God created us he actually put his hands in the dirt and formed Adam." "Yeah! But I don't want to touch it!" Isn't there something wrong with this, even given the fact that we're talking about teenage girls?
God created us as part of nature and commanded us to rule over it:
God blessed them and said to them, "Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground" (Gen. 1:28).
We thrive in an organic world, and we get messed up apart from it. Nature is the standard that we must live by, and is not something to escape or transcend. If we try to do the latter we do so to our detriment don't we? Let's hear it for dirt!
10 comments:
Good post, Matt. Having grown up on a farm and spending 10 years in camping ministry, I rarely get sick and have raised my kids on an extended 10-second rule with regard to food.
I feel empathy for those who are effected by some of the more severe allergies, but I can't help wondering with you if we've done it to ourselves.
Don't get me started on the evolution of playground equipment from our day to now...
Reason no. 28 to why I love my job. I come home and look like I got in a fight to the death with a bag of lawn clippings and a bucket of concrete.
Thanks guys.
The 10 second rule sounds great! Less waste, more immunity. And please do get started Craig, on the change over time to playground equipment. I hadn't thought of that and eagerly await your observations.
So, what are you doing this summer Tim?
Hooray for dirt!!! Having grown up on a farm, I loved sitting on the ground, making mud pies, planting seeds and watching vegetables and flowers emerge from the dirt! Just the smell of the earth after a rain is delightful. What a wonderful creation our Lord has made. Thank you for the delightful post!
Hey Matt----Interesting Article--I agree that it is good to (be exposed and) build up immunity to diseases and I think we build that resistance because we build immunity from the time we leave the crib---till we are laid to rest.
As a mom of a child with an auto immune disease and a food allergy, this is a subject I've thought a lot about.
I think that it's easy to be idealistic about "dirt and germs" and assume that if you've personally exposed yourself to them enough over your life, and you happen to be healthy, you've done something right and others maybe didn't and that is why they are sick. I don't really think it's that black and white.
Something is askew. Our world is broken and polluted and even our "dirt" is not what it's supposed to be. It's filled with pesticides and our animals aren't eating what they're supposed to be eating. You can't even eat something from the ocean with out it being contaminated because the whole ocean is filled with chemicals that aren't supposed to be there. We eat off poisonous things like teflon and we build our houses out of asbestos. We pump our babies full of vaccines that have all sorts chemicals and who knows what else...
Anyway, dirt was probably fine until a couple hundred years ago. I still think we should embrace nature and let our kids get "dirty." But I think we've really screwed things up.
And I don't think my kid has a food allergy or an auto immune disease because I didn't let him get close enough to nature or was overprotective.
Good comments Charity. We all had our kids playing in dirt. The log cabin, right?
You have helped me improve my understanding. My rant against germophobia needs some qualifications, and I certainly didn't mean to imply that anyone with allergic children has a dirt phobia.
It turns out that I'm allergic to something in nature that makes me sneeze and sometimes wheeze.
I think, soil and nature should be lovingly protected as a gift, so that it can function as a healthy playground. We don't need to be afraid of it because it has what we need, though, as you point out, it has also been cursed because of us and continues to be polluted by us. I also think we can redeem nature with such efforts as organic farming. The healthier our vegetable, the healthier we will be.
Thanks and blessings to you and yours.
I work at a landscaping job full time. It's been good especially with the amazingly mild weather we've been having. Makes mowing lawns or pouring concrete much more bearable.
Oh... the log cabin days. :-)
Thanks for the thoughtful response. I hope I didn't come across aggressive in any way. Sometimes it's hard to communicate on the web. I enjoy the dialogue, though!
This is an intriguing discussion, lots to think about.
Did you know that if babies are exposed to latex gloves when they are born, they are more likely to have latex allergies?
I have heard of a friend who has a child with the peanut allergy, they suspect that the mom ate a lot of peanut butter during pregnancy, which may have affected this situation but they just don't know.
Did you know that many, or maybe most, of our antibiotics actually come from the soil itself? You can go traveling out through the rain forest floor and search for soil samples that kill bacteria, and there you go, new antibiotics can be discovered. Of course, there is bacteria is soil too, both the anti and the biotic existing in the same environment.
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