Welcome our first guest Dad post! Thank you to Josh for lending his voice to this issue and being one awesome father.
Josh Tyson lives in Denver with his wife, Nicole, and their sons, Elias and Arius. He chronicles the media they (cautiously) share with their boys at thekidsarewatching.com and is a member of New Age Dad, the nation’s premier rock band of dads, toddlers, babies and dogs. Josh is a regular contributor to the New York Times’ Motherlode blog and is currently working on some children’s books.
My wife and I have always been skeptical of the classic American approach to well being. We don’t pop pain tablets when we have headaches and when we have colds we drink heaps of herbal tea in lieu of narcotic syrups. I sincerely doubt that either of us will ever experiment with antidepressants and putting one of our kids on something like Ritalin is out of the question.
Nicole pushed both of our boys into this world without meds and started breastfeeding them right away. We didn’t have them circumcised and weren’t thrilled about subjecting them to a battery of needles in the first few years of their lives.
In the months leading up to the birth of our first, the hasty conspiracy theorist in me was tempted to write off vaccination as another shortsighted way for Big Medicine to line their pockets, but the more research we did, the more confident we became that vaccination was the best choice for our family.
Nicole has a cousin with severe autism, so the concerns posed by famous people and concerned parents out of the limelight were not taken lightly. In the end, however, we decided that there wasn’t significant evidence to link vaccines to autism and that the risks of not vaccinating were far greater than the minimal risks posed by the catalog of recommended vaccines.
We also took into account that we want to travel with our boys, and there are plenty of global destinations we are interested in where diseases like polio haven’t been totally eradicated. Then there was the issue of civic duty. A big part of the reason that vaccines have been so effective in keeping the populace here free of nasty things like measles and mumps is that the vast majority of us are vaccinated against them.
What sealed the deal for us was the fact that every doctor we talked to had vaccinated their kids, or planned to when they had them. Out skepticism of certain elements of western medicine has always been taken with a grain of salt—namely that we aren’t doctors and what we know about the inner-workings of human body is scant compared with somebody who has trudged through eight years of medical school.
So while we’ll continue to keep our medicine cabinets bare, we’ll do so with extra piece of mind.