The best way to start out this article, I think, is to tell a story.

I once worked in a PetsMart in the small animal department. I took care of the fish, reptiles, small cute fuzzy things and small cute feathery things, in addition to keeping the department straight and answering questions and things. I once had a woman come in to buy fish, together with her two youngish children – the boy about 12 with glasses with those clips designed to keep them from being lost, the girl about 7 and very pasty and skinny. As I got to talking with her (starting with the usual, “What size tank do you have,” etc) the woman told me that they’d had a leopard gecko up until a few months ago and were now looking for a replacement “pet.”

“Oh? I love leopard geckos, they’re so pretty,” I said, thinking of my wonderfully dense gecko at home. The lady immediately derailed into a monologue about how they’re dirty, carry germs, and imminently not suitable for children at their [her childrens'] age. Entirely confused, I asked why she thought this way and she told about how her daughter had gotten severely sick (so badly that she had been in the Intensive Care Unit for a few days) with salmonella from having the leopard gecko in the house (she hadn’t even held it directly, always in a clean tub, or so the woman told me).

From the conversation, this woman was one of those people who are worried about everything. She disinfects everything, wouldn’t allow her children to touch anything, and immediately made them use the sanitize-gel stuff in the event they did brush up against something. I would lay fair odds she didn’t let her children play outside or anything either. I may be overgeneralizing, and it’s certainly possible that these kids had some sort of immune-system problem, but in the course of the conversation nothing like that was even implied.

I have never gotten seriously sick, and acquired my fair share of scrapes, cuts, gashes, and abrasions in my childhood (living on the edge of a greenspace, in Florida, with all your playmates being active boys will do that for a girl). I caught snakes and lizards and frogs a plenty in the wild, and only maybe washed up before dinner (ssh, don’t tell my mom.)

This, I think, is a wonderful example of both physical health and spiritual health – if you are never exposed to anything that might harm you, your natural defense mechanisms will never have the chance to develop properly, and consequently when you do come into contact with something severely harmful, those defense mechanisms have a far more difficult time protecting you.

What about those parents who continually strive to shelter their children from anything “wrong” or “bad” in the world? I believe they are doing their children a disservice, unintentionally of course – for if they have never encountered the little evils, how will they survive when they finally leave their parents’ control and encounter the big evils?

Many people have told me, “You will feel different when you have children of your own,” and I’m sure if I do I will agree with them. To a point. I haven’t yet seen any studies done on this particular subject, I have done quite a bit of my own observation through the people and the families around me, and this is what I continually find to be the case. At the very least, it is a question designed to be thought-provoking.