That picture could easily be me. I was a dirt dog as a kid. There are scores of pictures of me rooting around in sandboxes, gardens, and puddles. One of my happiest childhood memories is when I was nine, playing with my BFF, and us completely coating ourselves with mountains of mud and dirt in a construction lot two doors down. PapaDork had to hose us off in the driveway, and I was still finding mud in my ears for weeks.
My parents, to my great 
delight, didn’t have a problem with my pleasure at getting down and dirty. And now, they might be even more pleased, since there’s some idea that my early exposure to filth might have been good for my health.
According to this NPR blog, the gendered standards of cleanliness that dictate little girls should sip pretend tea and wear white dresses, while their male peers go mucking around in creeks, might be preventing girls from building up their immune systems in their earliest years and leading to health problems later.
This research is still in its speculative stages, since there are so many possible reasons for women’s higher rates of autoimmune diseases (their likelihood of reporting them not least among them), but that, combined with new research on allergies and kids that questions the conventional wisdom on eliminating possible allergens from infants’ diets, is all pointing towards the idea that living in a bubble is maybe not such a good idea for our physical health.
Of course people want to protect their kids from dangers and illness. But protection can go too far–and “protecting” girls differently based on notions of gender-appropriate behavior is beyond too far. We think it might damage their bodies, but we already know that it damages their spirits. Of course not every kid, whatever its sex or gender, is a mud monster, but the idea of preventing children from engaging in natural behaviors that merely make us uncomfortable is something we need do need to protect against. We have seen the enemy, and it isn’t dirt. It’s Us.
This interested me because since I moved to the US and Brooklyn in particular I’ve noticed that parents do seem oddly obsessed with wiping surfaces and ensuring that their children don’t get dirty. Also I’d actually never met children with allegies until I moved to the US – which is just a coincidence although I do wonder if some people err too much on the side of caution.
Then again I would say this as I am possessed of two feral and often filthy children who like to jump of tall dangerous things and head without fail for the muckiest part of any playground.
I’m in favor of keeping kids out of open sewers and the Gowanus Canal, but beyond that? Hose ‘em down as necessary and you’re good to go.
My most famous childhood picture shows me in a very girly pink jacket covered from head-to-toe in dirt. I’ve never quite understood the urge to create an antiseptic environment for children. I’ve read other studies (not focused on gender) that suggest that exposure to some of the nasty stuff we’re now taught to obsessively sanitize is important for a child’s immune system to develop normally. One doctor quoted in one of the studies even said that the best thing you can do for your baby’s immune system is to have a dog or a cat in the house.
I was a horsey child (and am a horsey adult) so was never terribly clean! It never occurred to me to wash the horse-grime off my hands before eating my packed lunch, or that sharing an apple with the pony in alternate bites might be a bad thing. Still doesn’t now! The equestrian world is overwhelmingly female, so there are still plenty of little girls getting muddy and grimy and not caring.
I’m with Becky. Keeping our kids in a sanitary bubble is counterproductive and a waste of time. Our kids were never hugely messy, but mud and dirt are part of growing up-or should be.
I’ve seen variations on this idea for a while. I’m curious though – it seems like other populations in the US would have more marked differences than male versus female. Country kids (or even suburbia kids) of certain groups tend to play outside a lot, even if boys are encouraged to more than girls, and are probably exposed to more and different sorts of bacteria than say, upper class city children.
I wish this hypothesis was 100% correct. I practically lived in mud as a child – my parents literally let me have a mud pit for fun – and still ended up with the diabeetus.
The theory that seems the most likely to me re: higher rate of autoimmune disorders in women is the idea that our double X chromosomes are actually confusing to our immune systems.
Hy husband is a complete germaphobe and we’re currently in the midst of a struggle over all things anti-bacterial. He LOVES the little wipes, the squirty soap for the bathroom, the little bottles he has stashed in the cars…
I, on the other hand, hate triclosan and stand firmly with Becky Sharper and mischiefmanager – try to keep kids away from the MOST TOXIC stuff, and the rest? Eh…they’ll be fine.
Oh Dorky – as kids, we were always outside.. playing in teh muds, eating fruit and veg freshly picked from the garden without washing the skin, not washing our hands before eating the unwashed fruit and veg from the garden.
But one of the more funniest moments about bugs and mud was my youngest brother when he started to get mobile (around 6-8 months). A couple of us found him sitting in the mud with half a bug hanging out of his mouth.
We laughed, giggled and squealed. Mum came to see what the noise was about, and then told us that we’d all done that at least once. We were a bit shocked! She didn’t seem to concerned about the bug though.
Did any of you see the movie Babies? This discussion relates to one of the points made (every so gently, it sorta went by the wayside). There were babies, really little babies, playing happily in the mud all day, and another whose parents spent all day cleaning surfaces with antiseptic wipes and all that. Guess where?
I absolutely think this is true. I’ve spent a lot of time in Central America, and moreover spent a fair amount of time around children there. But allergies are virtually non-existent there – and, to a one, the few children with allergies I met came from rich, urban families who lived more North American-style lives (read: indoors and germ-obsessed). Wherever I went, I’d see babies crawling around on dirty house and even market floors, and children playing in the street or the woods. Yet they were healthy!
Furthermore, most North Americans tend to have intestinal problems when they first visit Central America, no matter how careful they are in what the eat and drink – but I rarely did, even though I’d eat street food and drink tap water. While I was down there with a field course one year, every other person on the course had violent intestinal problems at one site, except for me. Which I attribute to the fact that, when I was growing up, we spent part of each summer at a rural cabin where we’d drink water from an open spring, which almost certainly exposed us to all sorts of “bugs” that we developed resistance to.
I grew up on a farm, the youngest of 5 kids. I’ve been exposed to probably just about everything! We had herds of barn cats, cows, a pond, rusty metal, old stuff in the attic of the sheds and barn, hay, straw, everything you can imagine got grubbed around in.
Still, two of my sibs have horrid allergies to pollen, grass, mold, etc. I’ve got a shitty autoimmune disease (developed as a kid) but no allergies.
This is a firm belief of my mother’s.
Probably also from convenience, since I grew up in the French countryside alongside a younger brother, two to four horses depending on the year, two to three dogs and a couple of cats. My parents both work, my grandmother kept an eye on us but she wasn’t an outdoor person – she lived in her own flat in our house – so we ran around outside a fair bit.
No allergies. I have a bunch of stress-related issues, but that’s it really.