Daddy Days: A common sense appeal for handling kids' illnesses
Ever since 2020, things have gotten weird regarding communicable diseases. Today's normally observed behaviors (carrying sanitizer everywhere, wearing masks outside, getting half a dozen shots a year) was something only the outlier germaphobe was doing in 2018. This deserves some consideration.
Plus, I haven’t written anything to incur the ire of readers in 2023 so I’m probably due.
I think we need to walk back the unreasonable (over) reactions to the possibility of a kid being sick.
Keeping a kid out of school or from getting together with friends seems reasonable if they’ve had a fever in the past 24 hours, have stomach stuff going on, or are actively feeling terrible (because hard as it is to remember, the sick have feelings, too).
But this whole new world of keeping kids out of school or from a get-together because they were near someone who became sick is a bridge too far. Canceling events because a kid has a runny nose or a cough? Should these mild, common childhood ailments rise to the level of quarantine and cancellation? Who is this in the best interest of anyway?
I know too well that the more kids you have, the more likely you are to be blamed for illnesses (my kid got it from your kid, etc.) so maybe I’m biased. But either way, I’m tired of the suspicion that every cough is COVID, every sniffle the flu and every illness is worthy of contact tracing (even if it’s just the extremely local kind done on text message threads I’m not on).
I’m not saying to go out there and have your kid sneeze in everyone’s face. Hygiene is still good and there’s nothing wrong with encouraging good, old-fashioned hand washing and social distancing (as in giving each other polite space, not the arbitrary 6-foot thing). But the stoking of fear of illness, the normalizing of pointing a finger when there is an illness, and the expectation that you declare any and all symptoms prior to any get-together like a drug commercial disclaimer on side effects has to stop.
Common sense says some basic rules for behavior when your kid(s) have a communicable disease is reasonable, but in 2023 things have landed far from reasonable.
Is it reasonable to test for flu, COVID and RSV weekly? How about anytime your kid has a cough or sore throat? If so, now appears to be the first time in history that’s been the case. If that’s what people mean by the “new normal” I’ll pass.
Somehow, we’ve pivoted to sickness being all about well people not getting sick, instead of primarily about the sick getting well. This is better than the Orwellian practice of calling well people sick (“asymptomatic spreaders”) but still not great. We use to say, “Feel better soon!” Now we say, “I’d feel better if you would stay away.”
It could be that all this is a bit too cynical of a take on the situation. Maybe in an effort to care for our neighbors (both sick and well), we’ve just overdone it as a society and thought medical tests and canceling events for a cough were the best way to protect each other. Even if they weren't, we were at least trying to look out for each other.
However, by 2023 it seems the practices have stayed but the intention is much different. Now it’s about looking out for number one. I think we sort of slipped into this avoid-at-all-costs mindset about communicable disease and it’s time to examine the suddenly common expectation of regular testing or canceling or quarantining “to be safe.”
Maybe it’s time to remember that, less than five years ago, there was such a thing as a common cold. And a commonsense approach to dealing with it.
Harris and his wife live in Pflugerville with their six sons. Please email comments or suggestions for future columns to thoughtsforcaleb@gmail.com.
This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Daddy Days: A common sense appeal for handling kids' illnesses
