I had to shake my head when I saw another mother carrying around hand sanitizer, because it’s a symbol of what’s wrong with our society.
Hand sanitizer is stupid and unnecessary. When someone prepares my food, it’s an acceptable time to apply hand sanitizer (because, as we all know, kitchen workers intentionally sneeze on their hands before making our food). But I can’t seem to go far without seeing some poor preschool kid getting drowned in hand sanitizer, and it’s ridiculous.
It’s hardly the only silly thing we do—it’s part of a larger cultural movement to protect children from everything.
Some of it’s for the best, no doubt. Airbags, for example, are a beneficial safety precaution for young drivers. But when we’re wrapping children in a dripping bundle of sanitizer and padding, things have gone too far.
Previous generations survived just fine without the silly little things we do to shelter kids, and how does any of it really help? Sometimes kids need to experience a little pain. Pain is a part of life, isn’t it?
The world today is actually a safer place than it was 30 or 40 years ago. However, with the advent of cell phones and the Internet, people have become more aware of hazards and more cautious as a result.
That isn’t exactly surprising, but the amount of time kids are spending out and about is plummeting.
As many as 40 percent of schools nationwide have cut recess. A recent study by the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York surveyed 11,000 eight and nine-year-olds. It showed that kids who got at least 15 minutes of recess time per day behaved better in class.
We’re taking away their fun time, covering them in alcohol-saturated slop, and preparing them in dry classrooms for tests that may or may not matter.
We used to be a less regular, less regimented society, and that worked just fine. It’s just not necessary to overshelter and overschedule kids this way.
Some precautions make sense, but there is a line, and it seems to me like we’ve crossed it. Let kids be kids.