Do you remember making mud pies as a kid and then eating them? Do you remember how sick you’d feel afterwards and how your mother would berate you for doing something so stupid? Well, the good news is that doing disgusting things like that may have actually helped you in the long run by testing and thus strengthening your immune system. That’s how our bodies work: What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.
However, the generation following in our footsteps seems to have missed this memo, or at least their parents never bothered to read it.
One very troubling example of this is the fact that some parents are refusing to let their children to be immunized. I’m sure you’ve all heard the myth that immunizations have been proven to be bad for children. Jenny McCarthy for example, an American model and comedian, is a prominent anti-vaccine activist who strongly believes her son’s development of autism is directly related to his childhood immunization shots. In fact the truth is just the opposite. Immunizations are the greatest thing to come from science since, well, ever. Her public activism against immunizations puts hundreds of children at risk every year.
Immunizations are a way for our bodies to have a leg up against incoming diseases or illnesses and are a huge contribution to the fact that people are actually surviving childhood these days.
Yes, there are dangers to immunizations and side affects have been known to occur, but they are very rare, and thousands of times less dangerous than the diseases from which they protect. Some parents don’t understand this, and they put their children at serious risk by refusing to let them be immunized.
Years ago, thanks to immunizations many deadly diseases were halted in their tracks, several steps from being eradicated altogether. Measles is a good example of this. Once a disease that claimed the lives of many, the threat of measles had been neutralized by vaccines. However, as more parents refuse these immunizations, archaic diseases have begun making a resurgence. In the United States, a measles epidemic killed many young children in 2008.
Illness and sickness are all around us. Perhaps not on the magnitude of the measles in North America, but if your child participates in sports or has ever played outside with friends, chances are they’ve scratched or cut themselves multiple times. In elementary school we’re given an immunization against many kinds of illnesses that can be gained from those sorts of cuts. The kids who didn’t get the immunization, and there were quite a few in my year, run a high risk for being diagnosed with something potentially lethal when they injure themselves.
However, this is just a small part of a much larger problem. Some parents are just overly paranoid of everything that might cause harm to their children. If they hear even the smallest rumour that something good might hurt little Timmy or Molly, it’ll drive them up the wall in fear.
And so, little Timmy and Molly grow up in a controlling and overprotective family dynamic, and grow up with weak immune systems and an inability to deal with real life. I like to refer to Timmy and Molly and all their friends as the “Pussy Generation.”
This generation is made up of children who grew up with overprotective parents who never let them go outside and eat mud or scuff up their knees until their jeans became ruined with blood. This generation has parents who dote over them constantly and drown them in praise even when praise really shouldn’t be given. Parents think this is just helping their kids grow strong, but its really just setting them up for a much harder fall later on in life. That is, if they’re lucky enough to survive not being immunized.
//Cecilia Yus
Writer
//Illustration by JJ Brewis
