BUILDING YOUR CHILDREN’S IMMUNE SYSTEM

Hint: It Takes Exposure

The Baby Boomer Childhood

Except for those who had germaphobe parents, my generation played in dirt, ate odd things, hung out with sick kids and basically didn’t worry all that much about the many scrapes, bruises and more serious injuries we incurred.  Our playgrounds allowed us to swing over the top without cushiony pads underneath us.  I remember German measles parties, where parents deliberately tried to infect the neighborhood kids, as getting the disease as an adult was far more serious.

Why did they allow this?  The truth is that while you temporarily inherit your mother’s immune system so that you are protected by anything she has created antibodies to, this protection only lasts around two months.  After that, you have to build your own.  And that requires exposure.  Us Baby Boomers got a LOT of exposure and thus, have robust immune systems.

Why Is This Important Now?

The generation of kids being raised now are being cared for in a far different way than we were.  Anxious parents invested heavily in Lysol, hand sanitizers and other cleaning products long before Covid knocked on our doors.  Most of them were happy to mask their kids, and while inconvenient, were willing to isolate them and keep them on Zoom classes rather than insist on in-person education.  They have demanded “safe’ playgrounds, want babysitters vetted and credentialed and otherwise have tried to protect their children from everything.  Unfortunately, this tendency doesn’t stop after childhood. Too many snowplow and helicopter parents are inviting themselves to college and job interviews.  Note:  This is generally a disqualifier for your child.

On some level, I get it. No one really wants their child to suffer.  But the medical truth is that they will actually suffer more if you protect them like this.  Their weak immune system makes them far more vulnerable to regular diseases that our generation weathered pretty easily.  And now, one awful disease has started causing serious disease in kids; it’s a bigger threat than Covid.

RSV

Respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) is an infectious disease that can be very serious in young kids.  Although normally as common as flu, healthy kids and adults usually recover reasonably quickly.  But you need to have a good immune system to get it out of your system.  This year, kids who have been masked and protected are getting it far more frequently and more severely.  Hospital space is at a premium.  Beyond the normally helicoptering, the last two years, those kids who were isolated are far more likely to get a bad case of RSV.

Meningitis is on the rise as well, and that was a disease that we never heard much about when I was a kid.  Note: none of these hospitalized kids have Covid.  Doctors are calling this an “immunity debt.”  Without a way to quickly marshal an attack against an illness, kids tend to be sicker and more likely to be hospitalized.  Few kids died of Covid, but now could be dying of other diseases that wouldn’t have been as serious a few years back.

Solution

We have to learn from this.  Prior to Covid, we knew that the best way to protect the vulnerable was to advise them to isolate as much as possible while the rest of us went about our business.  Even with a novel (lab-created) disease, only a short isolation makes sense until we learn a bit more about it.  We need to do what we can to keep our immune system healthy be exposing ourselves and challenging our body to respond. 

I know this works.  During the past two years, I ignored isolation wherever and whenever I could, so when I got Covid (2x), I got well very quickly.  In fact, I wasn’t sure I was sick as all I had was a persistent, dry cough.  It responded well to OTC cough drops.  I almost never get sick.  I take a lot of D-3 and vitamins, exercise a lot and try to eat well.  We can all do this.  Take off your mask and get out there!

The Cost of Lockdowns