Opinion: Treating kids as invulnerable is treating them as disposable

[ladycatlover]

Someone posted this article on Twitter - it concerns the treatment of Children in Canada. Sounds much the same as in UK to me.

Parents often believe in a societal fiction that children will just be OK and will live healthy lives. This can help cope with the anxieties of raising children.

The truth is, there is no guarantee children will be OK. When you take off the rose-coloured glasses and look at life for what it is, there are no guarantees at all. As grief counsellors often point out, death is a natural part of life. However, death can be hidden and ignored in our society, in favour of a sort of blissful ignorance. But if your child ever becomes seriously disabled or dies, you come to understand how utterly meaningless many of the things that you previously found important were.

The myth that children will just be fine is largely a product of the comfort we have been afforded by the past 100 years of public health progress. Historically, almost half of all children died before adulthood. Even in 1950 child mortality rates were five times as high as today. Along with clean water and hygiene, one big part of progress has been the near eradication of many infectious diseases by vaccines. That trend is now reversing as more people become vaccine-hesitant or anti-vaccination.

 

[DokaGirl]

Thanks for this @ladycatlover

Yes, public health care experts in Canada adivsed kids would be fine. They broadcast the idea COVID would only adversely affect older people. This gave teens and young adults license to carry on as usual.

 

[CRG]

Given the author is a colleague of Timothy Caulfield this is a pretty disappointing article, it's a mess of history, culture and stats that doesn't gel into anything comprehensible.

Saying COVID was the leading cause of death amongst <19s sounds terrible but most of those deaths were of kids with health vulnerabilities about who no one thought they were invulnerable. Most 'all cause' child deaths globally from are from avoidable disease but the article doesn't seem concerned with that even though that would be a more significant comparator than Roman Egypt or ancient Nasca. The greatest health threats to children and young people in the developed world are obesity and inactivity, which I suppose could be a result of parental notions of invulnerability but has been clearly linked to parental fears about the dangers of the outside world, hardly supporting an invulnerability hypothesis.

The author seems to have some message (in line with Caulfield) about challenging the anti vax movement, but that movement isn't driven by notions of invulnerability, but a perverse sense of the natural world being safer than science, i.e it's about misplaced fearfulness not a lack of fear. Anti vax people might believe in measles parties, but they aren't insisting their children swim in sewage or have regular periods of growth stunting famine every year.

The author seems to be a lawyer, on the basis of this article he would be better to stick to strictly legal questions and leave historical epidemiology and social psychology to his colleagues.