Growing Up Green: Baby and Child Care (eBook)

Chapter 1

A Letter to Parents

Half a century ago, most parents had a pretty good sense of their responsibilities toward their children: to provide them with food, clothing, shelter, an education, and, of course, love. Like parents throughout history, they did whatever was in their power to keep their children safe, to protect them from harm.

But what does it mean today, to 'keep our children safe'? In recent years, the job of raising -- and protecting -- our children seems to have become a lot more complicated. Our lifestyles have undergone radical changes over the past few decades, and so has the environment we live in.

As a culture, we seem to be in constant motion. We work more, and sleep less, than ever before. Instead of making time for a good old-fashioned sit-down dinner at home, we opt for the drive-in window of the nearest fast-food restaurant. We live off processed foods loaded with sugars, synthetic additives, and trans fats. We skip our morning walk and instead spend hours of every day locked inside our cars or plugged into various electronic devices.

And perhaps most significantly, harmful toxins have become more and more present in our environment. Every week, more chemicals are introduced into our environment, often without first being tested for safety on humans, much less safety on children. These toxins pervade every aspect of our lives: the air we breathe, the water we drink, even the clothes we wear. We spray our lawns with pesticides, and eat fish contaminated with mercury, and drink milk pumped up with hormones. We sleep on mattresses treated with bioaccumulative flame retardants and scrub our kitchens -- and our faces -- with irritating chemicals. We're inundating ourselves with toxins twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, and most of the time we don't even know it!

So what, you might be asking, does any of this have to do with raising a child?

The answer is absolutely everything. Over the past thirty years, these changes in our lifestyle, diet, and environment have taken a dramatic -- and tragic -- toll on our children's health. We're seeing epidemic levels of diabetes and obesity. Pediatric cancers have risen steadily at a rate of 1 percent annually over the last twenty years. A poor diet and lack of exercise have contributed to an epidemic of childhood obesity, with one in six children in the United States between the ages of six and nineteen considered overweight. Asthma rates have increased tenfold over the last decade. Approximately one out of every six U.S. children has a developmental disability, including speech and language disorders, learning disabilities, and attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Approximately 1 in 150 American children has an autism spectrum disorder (ASD).One out of every eight babies is born premature in this country, and the rate of premature births increased nearly 31 percent between 1981 and 2003. Rheumatoid arthritis has become the third-most-common childhood disease -- among infants. Childhood allergies are at record levels.

If you're like me, you probably feel pretty horrified upon confronting these sobering facts for the first time. But I don't want this information to frighten or paralyze you. On the contrary: It should empower you to start asking some critical questions about what's causing this extraordinary increase in diseases over the last twenty-five years and what you as a parent can do to reverse these trends.

The World Health Organization estimates that we could prevent more than 80 percent of all chronic illnesses by improving our lifestyles in simple ways, like working to reduce our exposure to...