It Pays To Eat Dirt

Mommies, this one is aimed directly square between your eyeballs.

Stop with the obsessive wiping of hands with alcohol-based hand sanitizers, the constant running over to the playground equipment (if you even let your kids play on the filthy things) with hand-wipes and the hand-wringing over a bit of drool from your children while they suck with wild abandon on their binkies (which you put in the dishwasher on a nightly basis).

Just. Stop.

I was born in 1955. I grew up in the scrubbiest of woods, with ticks, dirt, snakes, bugs and other messy things. I used to peel the bark off pine trees and pretend it was bacon for my backyard restaurant. I played with the natural clay in the ground around my childhood home, digging it up with mom's best wooden kitchen spoons. I ran barefoot through patches of sand spurs and heavy woods, where snakes thrive and alligators lived in the swampy areas. I had an "outside" dog and yes, I used to kiss her right on her big black nosebone. I used to sit in the chicken yard in an old webbed lawn chair and watch them for hours, pick up all the pretty feathers from the peacocks out in the yard and eat strawberries and tomatoes right out of the garden, unwashed and warm from the sun.

I have had phenomenal health, except for some issues, which were most definitely not caused by never wiping with Purell.

Mommies, ease up a bit. Stop being obsessive. Let your child be a child, and that includes playing in the dirt, swinging on swing sets, running through fields, riding bikes through the neighborhood. Give your child the happiness of playing in the rain, jumping into a pile of leaves and occasionally, kissing a dog on the nose.

You cannot protect them from everything, and the harder you try, the more nervous with worry you become, the more you hover over them, the more they will try to chew off their feet to get away from you later on in life. You must let them fall on the sidewalk, you must let them try to ride their new bike alone, you must let them be children.

I'm not saying "let them be raised by wolves," although having studied wolves and their packs, they are exceptional parents. I'm saying stop projecting all your fears on your babies. It will do them harm later on in life, trust me.