is a sick child a healthy child?

It is a topic that is becoming a bigger debate every year. Are we protecting our children from the natural environment to the point their immune system is never adequately developed?

Articles such as this one (link) point out "According to the hygiene hypothesis, asthma, eczema, hay fever and childhood diabetes are all being fuelled by childhoods in which youngsters rarely roll in the mud, splash in puddles or play with animals"*
Does this mean we need to stop cleaning our homes and washing our children's clothes? The missing element in the thinking of building our children's immune system is environment. Our bodies are designed to adapt to their environment (Link on how the biological adaptation takes place). But as pointed out in the article, this adaptation takes time. And during that time period, we may suffer from the bacterial attack or virus, or lack of oxygen, as one example is given. In the higher altitude example, a climber can get so sick that they get pulmonary edema and can die. So how do we help our children's immune systems adapt without endangering them?

There is no substitute for patience and time. Each individuals body is going to adapt at a different rate; some will never adapt. This leaves a parent in a very difficult dilemma of wanting the child to be healthy, while trying to guess how much exposure to dirt, pet dander, bacteria and even other sick children to expose them to.

A mother's instinct is to protect her child, so even the thought, of allowing their child to get sick, goes against everything in their thinking process. A way to do both is to start with the child's diet and sleep habits. The immune system needs to be strong in the first place, to survive during the adaptation time. A balanced diet (including important fats and proteins) is feeding all aspects of the child's immune system. This seems to be a missing element in many of the articles on childhood diseases. Food that is processed, or GMO crops raised in soil where important minerals are missing, certainly are a part of the equation to the immune systems ability to adapt. This is the area a mother can focus on for her child's health.

The next step is adequate sleep. Learning to be able to go to sleep is very important to our overall health, and we will go over sleep tricks in another post. How much sleep is covered in this link.

With a focus on food that is nutrient and mineral rich, combined with adequate sleep, is our job focus to help a child be able to adapt in their environment.

Now we need to increase their environmental exposure. This is pretty simple, getting out in the outdoors, playgrounds, parks, take pound pets for a walk; basically getting out of the house and away from the video games is the goal.

What overall environment your child will be exposed to over their life time, is what you are looking for. With that will be exposure that will make a child sick from time to time. But a healthy child will quickly overcome (adapt) to that bacteria or virus, and in the process, you are helping build health for life.

*Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2118871/How-keeping-children-clean-wreck-immune-systems.html#ixzz3KZJqwnTM