Totally Freaked Out
Brand name toys are painted with lead, supermarket food contains hormones, and even the family doctor can’t give a straight answer about vaccines. A new generation of moms and dads don’t know whom to trust, and they’re embracing extreme measures to protect their kids from invisible threats. Lessons in irrational parenting By Siri Agrell
Image credit: All Illustrations by Asaf Hanuka
The invitation to Christophe Wiseman’s second birthday party came with a caveat: “Presents are appreciated but not necessary. If you bring a gift, my parents ask that you consider a toy made from natural materials.”
Plastic isn’t the only thing that’s off-limits in Christophe’s Riverdale home. His parents—Pierrette, a 31-year-old full-time mom, and Geoff, a 36-year-old computer programmer—go to great lengths to limit his exposure to anything artificial. Barely a processed or prepackaged morsel has passed his cherubic lips. The family has their fruits and vegetables delivered weekly by Front Door Organics and buys their dairy, eggs and meat from the PC Organics line. Once a month, they pile in their Camry and drive to Grain Process Enterprises, a mill near the Scarborough Town Centre, where they pick up bulk bags of organic rice, pasta, quinoa and spelt, as well as 10‑kilogram sacks of unbleached white and hard whole wheat flour, which Pierrette uses to make all of their bread from scratch.
She originally changed her own diet when a stomach ailment led her to a nutritionist and, eventually, to a vegetarian regimen. When she discovered she was eating for two, she expanded her research and found danger lurking everywhere. She promptly cancelled her Babies R Us registry and asked family and friends for all-natural gifts. She installed apps on her iPhone that tell her which beauty products and household cleaners are the safest. (And, yes, she knows that the iPhone itself, like other cellular devices, may be transmitting harmful radiation into her little boy’s brain, so she turns on the gadget’s airport mode whenever he’s playing with it.) Each morning, Christophe is dressed in cloth diapers, organic pants and tees, or second-hand goods, clothing Pierrette hopes has been cleansed of manufacturers’ flame retardants by multiple rounds in the washing machine. His drawings are hung on walls painted in deep orange eco-friendly paint, and he crawls about on bamboo flooring, which his parents selected after agonizing over the greenest options, though they still worry about the possibility of toxins lingering in its adhesive.
Pierrette cleans everything in her house, from those floors to Christophe’s toys, with vinegar and baking soda, and whips up batches of homemade finger paint on the stove instead of buying mass-produced. She continues to breast-feed her son and even retired a beloved rubber ducky from her own childhood for fear of chemicals leaching into her baby’s bathwater. She recently wrote a letter to Oral-B to ensure that the electric toothbrush she struggles to get into the tot’s mouth every day is BPA-free but hasn’t heard back. And when her son took to chewing on the antique chest in the living room, she bought a test kit to make sure its shiny blue paint didn’t contain any traces of lead. She has used the kit four times since.
As Christophe grows up and enters the wider world of daycare, play dates and kindergarten, the Wisemans will demand changes outside the home, as well. “I question everything,” Pierrette says. “When it comes to his health, I don’t want to gamble.”
A generation of moms and dads has taken a purity pledge for their kids. You can’t throw an organic terry cloth teething ring today without hitting a parent obsessing over pesticides on apples and phthalates in soothers.
The pure parenting movement has been gurgling on the fringe for some time, but it took its first big steps into the mainstream in 2008, with the release of studies claiming that bisphenol A, a chemical compound commonly found in plastic baby bottles, could be linked to everything from cancer to hormone disruption. Although studies on the chemical’s effects have been inconclusive, Canada became the first country in the world to ban the import and sale of baby bottles containing BPA. The BPA scare was followed by a widespread recall of toys from China contaminated with lead paint. The better-safe-than-sorry attitude soon prompted a complete reassessment of childhood staples.
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I thoroughly enjoyed reading this article. It is very relevant to the parents of our generation and highlights the importance of making oneself aware of the pros and cons of being vigilant caregivers. Our children need us to be their voice and ensure their health and well-being is not compromised. At the same time, they also need us to provide them with a model to make educated and rational decisions so as to avoid "freaking out" our children. Great article, Siri!
Diana - Toronto Teacher Mom
February 19, 2010 | by TorontoMomI am grateful for the article, in that it highlights conscious consumerism. The more people who are involved in mindfully choosing what they purchase has an influence in what companies produce. The more parents consider what their children are exposed to day in and day out, the mire wise we will be about what is put into the environment and what we are exposed to. The paranoia involved in it is more about the individual than the parent. As a parent of 3 who is trying to expose our children to a more compassionate and less toxic life, I feel no paranoia, but rather a sense of pride in how we shop and consume.
March 5, 2010 | by tedgrandThe article is subtly dismissive of such conscious consermism - this is my only concern about the article.
Jeez, poor children… As Oscar Wilde once said “Everything in moderation, including moderation.” Eat healthily, GREAT! Don’t suck on lead, very smart of you! But my god, allow your children to have a childhood! Not just that, let them have a childhood they will look back on fondly. They will resent you as a parent when they grow up otherwise… “Oh remember that year when mom took away all of our Halloween candy and made us eat garbanzo beans and read organic literature on the evils of processed sugar? Wasn’t that just the best time of your life?!?” I think not… On another tangent, to build up immunity to something you have to be in contact with it! These poor children will be allergic to everything under the sun. Let them roll in the mud, eat a peanut butter sandwich and not have to worry about everything that goes in their mouth. They’ll be happier and healthier in the long run.
March 16, 2010 | by RSinTOI worry about these excesses. I agree it's good to minimize things such as sugar consumption, but it sounds like some of these parents ( it seems it's mothers who've taken the lead) are making it likelier for their children to feel deprived, overprotected, and allergic to boot.
What if they want to join the Scouts? Learn karate? Will these moms insist that the mats be replaced with organic mats?
March 18, 2010 | by villatourTotally Freaked Out? No. Totally educated and aware? Yes!
March 21, 2010 | by minnieb17Since when does thinking for yourself and making conscious decisions make you a paranoid person? It seems as though you have gone to "extreme measures" to make sure people stay as numbed out as possible. I don't think it's a joke how much we have been lead to believe that the majority of products consumed are okay for ourselves in the least, let alone our planet. What do you think? "We're already so messed up to hell with it all?"
I personally think that it's about time people have started to come back to our senses and back to basics as well.
We've come so far away from what is natural that most people don't question anything anymore. Just buy it, consume it and throw it out when you are finished.
Did you ever stop to think that this movement of people, who are going back to nature are the people providing our best chance for future survival? All the rest will die of obesity and laziness, stupidly festering is their toxic trash heaps.
In the end, only survival of the fittest and natural (key word!) selection will prove who has the right ideas. My bet is already locked.
we live in an age of information,and you cannot ignore the information we have that shows many of the products we bring into our homes are toxic and supporting a corruptive,capitalist,wasteful industry.You are saying that conscious parents became mainstream because of BPA scares?Are you serious?
Organic Vegetables delivered to the front door often come from businesses who support local farmers and often work alongside with foodshares and co-ops. They can be great because they can introduce new organic foods to a family who may not have bought a certain fruit or veggie by themselves. Eating organic food when possible is better for everyone. better for the planet. better for your health. Have you ever eaten a nice, organic orange? And then had a huge, watery, tasteless genetically modified orange? You tell me which one is better for you. you tell me what you’d rather feed your children?
I just don’t see how not wanting to eat meat that has been loaded with antibiotics, meat that has lived a horrible life, pumped with growth hormones can be perceived by anyone as trying to avoid “invisible threats”.
What is wrong with not wanting your child to have such a huge carbon footprint? Being mindful about a childs’ toys isn’t just paranoia. it’s about being conscious about where the toys come from, the conditions they were made under. it’s about wanting to limit the amount of useless garbage products you throw away. It’s about wanting to keep plastics to a minimum not just because they leach chemicals that are harmful to our children, but once they are in the landfill,(because childhood does not last forever) they leach harmful chemicals into the soil, and do not decompose.
The H1N1 craze..are you saying that the parents who didn’t rush out to vaccinate their kids were the ones who were panicking?
March 22, 2010 | by EveningGoddessThere is not some wave of new parents who are hyper vigilant.There is a new generation of citizens who question the crap they’ve been spoon fed their whole lives.About consumerism, big pharma, the food we eat, the products we buy, the things we “need”, the substances we come in contact with
Saying that parents who worry about climate change are worried because of the decline of male babies is bull.we’re worried about the future of our planet because we have children who we hope to see grow up without a major catastrophe due to climate change.
Educating others is not “The peer pressure to conform to the new parenting rules” its about informing others about information that they may not otherwise come across.we trust the products we but to not be harmful to us, and when we learn the truth about certain products being harmful when we thought all along that they were safe, we naturally want to spread this knowledge along to people who may not have heard the truth yet.
Your article should never have been published.“lessons in irrational parenting”? Hmm,more like lessons in ignorant writing.
I am disgusted
All very interesting comments. To point out that we certainly live in a new information age is obvious. Even though this may be brilliant, it is important to understand that all information is not great! You choose your books don't you? You learn that all advertising is not accurate, right? Learning to sort out good, well researched, valid information from information frought with falsehoods or simply poor research is important. I see that numerous so called experts on green life, especially in the health area or wrt foods, rely on fearmongering or poorly documented and poorly researched information and not on adequately researched information with checks and balances.
It is NOT acceptable to say ONLY that we should stop using everything until it's proven ok. That's simply unfounded. Let's invade Iraq while we're at it b/c of course we know they have weapons of mass destruction. Why? B/c someone told us so!
I have seen the fervor over everything new when it comes to research lately. The latest study is trotted out as the best and only thing to follow. This simply isn't true. It's painfully apparent that the media drools over the latest anything. So, I will imagine that in coming years, further research and reviews of MULTIPLE studies on ANY matter will show different results. This is something I see frequently in the health industry.
I agree that we sometimes get pummelled by drug companies and such, but does that mean you won't take ANY medicine? Use your head but don't get carried away.
I believe that's the jist of the article.
March 23, 2010 | by yfnv