In recent weeks, writer, cancer survivor and mother of two young children, Amanda Enayati has written about pursuing a healthy life for her family by cutting excessive sugars, bad fats, dyes, preservatives and pesticides from their diet and reducing her household's "toxic burden." Today, she reflects on modern parenting and her willingness to be considered different.
Am I really that extreme about health? I don’t know that I am.It’s possible that my pediatrician groans whenever he sees me coming. Perhaps he is a touch annoyed that I don’t let him stack my kids’ vaccinations on top of each other, that I make him spread them out over the course of months, that I demand mercury-free vaccines, that I tend to hold off on giving my children antibiotics until it’s absolutely clear that there’s no way around them.
So maybe I’m a tad eccentric.
Two weeks into considering my own approach to healthier living, I decided to conduct an informal poll of a few dozen parents on the East and West Coasts and in between to determine just how far off the beaten path I have wandered these past few years.
What types of things are you doing or not doing for your children’s health that may be considered “out of the norm?” is what I asked.
“We had our first child swimming at six months. But our second is two and a half, and hasn’t started yet and she won’t until she’s a bit older.”
Why?
“Studies show a link between swimming regularly in chlorinated swimming pools and lung damage and childhood asthma. There are no salt water or ozone pools nearby and so we will wait.”
Another mom: “I will not let my daughter straighten her (African-American) hair, even though my mother let me relax my hair as a child. My daughter has started to ask about it, but I’m not allowing anyone to slather chemicals on her head.”
“Juice!” Said a third mom. “Forget soda. I don’t even allow juice in the house. My husband’s brothers and sister all have diabetes, and fruit juice consumption has been linked to an increased risk for type 2 diabetes.”
My friend Chad, the token male in the bunch, considered my question: “Did we ban anything? No. But my older daughter (who’s eight) refused to step into another fast food place after she saw the movie 'Food, Inc.' at a friend’s house last year. I kind of figured she’d get over it at some point but then we went to a wedding and one of the guests, a woman who does PR and marketing for a fast food chain, offered her some coupons for food. My daughter looked her square in the eyes and said: ‘Thank you, but we don’t eat there.’”
Interesting.
“And then there was the boycott.”
I raised an eyebrow.
“She started a boycott of a children’s website because they advertise fast food on their site. She told her friends they’re trying to ‘hypnotize’ people into eating the food. After that she started muting all the commercials in the middle of her shows.”
Another mom was downright indignant: “Oh, well, our pediatric dentist hates me for sure.”
Hates you?
“My daughter, who was four then, had a brown spot on one of her back teeth. The dentist thought the spot might be developing into a cavity and decided she would watch it closely. On that first day she took an X-ray of the tooth, which I let her do. But then she had us come in every three months over the course of that year and each of those times she wanted to X-ray that same tooth. Heck if I was going to let them X-ray my child four times in one year over a brown spot.”
She took a breath: “And here’s the thing. That dentist’s eyes rolled all the way into the back of her head each and every time I refused permission for an X-ray and then what did I see in the headlines? Widespread concerns about children’s overexposure to radiation in dentists’ chairs.”
Did you take the article in to show the dentist?
“No, but I should.”
A mom from my son’s preschool told me: “The pink and blue medicine drives me up the wall.”
What do you mean?
“About a month ago my son had these really high fevers for over a week. I took him to the doctor and they told me not to worry, but to control the fever by alternating between acetaminophen and ibuprofen. By the end of that first week we had finished our bottles, and around midnight one night I went to the drugstore to pick up more. I happened to look at the boxes and notice the inactive ingredients, a virtual ‘who’s who’ list of what not to eat - never mind if your body’s battling a virus: artificial colors, parabens, high fructose corn syrup, sodium benzoate, propylene glycol.
"Maybe I was exhausted after a week of very little sleep. I marched up to the pharmacist and demanded answers. How do you feed this kind of garbage to a child fighting off illness? We’d used two bottles of the stuff at that point! The pharmacist kept repeating that those ingredients were the medicine’s dyes and preservatives. As if somehow that made it all OK.”
So what did you do?
“Eventually the pharmacist helped me find the dye-free version of one but they were out of the other. And there was nothing I could do about the other crap. Have we really not advanced enough scientifically to figure out how to make kids’ medicine without questionable inactive ingredients? Where’s the common sense here?”
I sat there later that night, head abuzz, trying to digest everything I had heard.
Certainly our generation is approaching health, nutrition and parenting in dramatically different ways than most of our own parents did. Norms have changed as they are bound to do over time.
But there’s more underlying the myriad dos and don’ts and wills and won’ts - at least among those I spoke to: their inclination to investigate, to question that which does not appear to make sense, their expectation of thoughtful, common sense and ethical solutions. Many of these parents seem perfectly willing to march to the beat of their own drums. And, if necessary, to take their dollars elsewhere.
And it seemed to me that the common thread was a sort of consciousness: conscious living, conscious parenting, conscious consuming.
Perhaps some of these parents will be seen as extreme for now. Not for long, though. I suspect that they are the way of the future.
Source : CNN
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