Kids Are Sick, A Lot
No one tells children this, but one of the best parts of growing up is not ‘staying up late’ or not ‘being allowed to eat dessert every night’, but simply not being sick all the time.
We think of childhood as perhaps the best time of life… but there is one way in which human children are truly miserable (aside from formal schooling), in having an extraordinary level of infectious diseases:
A half century ago everyone expected their children to experience the ravages of measles, mumps, rubella, chicken pox, influenza, and other infections that had evolved into the “childhood” diseases. This was traumatic enough that even as a small child, not knowing anything about the dynamics of disease epidemics, I wondered why it was I had to experience all of these diseases as well as an almost continuous string of less severe “colds” and enteropathies (we called them all stomach flu), when all the while our pets appeared to remain perfectly healthy…I assert the likely possibility that because of our unique ability to change our ecosystem, for the past few thousand years, we human beings have been the most diseased species on earth.
This is not to say that puppies or kittens do not experience any infant mortality. They do, as infections can kill entire litters, and young cats remain vulnerable to some issues (eg. the disease FIP—rare in adult cats, terminal in young cats). But if they survive, they will usually be in good health thereafter. For example, of my family’s ~6 dogs & cats while I was growing up, I cannot recall any of them ever just ‘getting sick’ the way we kids did. Generally, they all seemed to be enviably in good health every day, right up to their final decline. (COVID-19 is another case in point: cats & dogs can get COVID, but few do and it doesn’t hurt them much.)
The contrast with human children is stark. It is easy to forget (until you become a parent), but children are sick, all the time, particularly in elementary school or lower. It is hard to remember, but attendance records were hard to set because you might absent at any time—if it wasn’t chicken pox or the winter flu, it was just who-knows-what, caught from your sibling before you (the larger the family, the more likely that someone in it is sick or recently sick or will become sick). In elementary school, no one blinked an eye at a classmate being gone or leaving in the middle of the day. (Or at having a runny nose or picking it, either—adults throughout history have been extremely annoyed by children spitting or picking their nose, but perhaps what they should be asking was why there seemed to be something perpetually wrong with childrens’ noses & throats.) To make any impact against this general miasma of sickness, you had to do something memorable like barf in the classroom, requiring the janitor to come: now there’s “impact” for you! (Whereas in high school, being absent was cause for remark; and if you barfed in class, you’d never live it down for the rest of high school, and if immortalized in the yearbook or social media, perhaps never at all.)
This is hard to remember in part because the experience of being sick is so miserably gray and unmemorable. You lay in bed, or on the couch, and time drags by, in a combination of boredom and pain. (The pain is easier to remember than the boredom, because boredom is almost by definition the absence of anything to remember; but the boredom was doubtless the predominant experience.) How do you remember the long afternoons, wishing for the day to end and the hours to reel by instead of drag, perhaps all alone by yourself in an empty house as everyone is away at work or school or running errands (not that they really want to be around a sick kid to begin with), as you flipped through the daytime cable television and realized the age-old truth that there really was nothing on TV? One illness just blends into the next, as you spend hours on the toilet listlessly paging through a comic book, or finally get to sleep only to have to drag yourself to the toilet at 3AM (tailed by a concerned cat). It is fun to have your mom make chicken soup for you, as a literal dish, not a figure of speech, but chicken soup is not really that great: that’s why it’s the traditional food for sick kids like you, so you can keep it down, and you don’t usually eat it otherwise. (Tastier food might be wasted on you anyway, as whatever it is clogs your nose and grays out the taste of things as thoroughly as it grays the days.)
And this all just goes on, every few months, for seemingly forever, just with the frequency imperceptibly spacing out, until by adulthood, one might go years without more than a mild cold or flu. (COVID-19 was memorable for me because, even with the vaccinations, my 2 major cases were the worst illnesses I had experienced in ~20 years, and the experience flashed me back to childhood as I recalled that as bad as this was, it had been worse as a kid—at least I wasn’t barfing all over my bed, multiple times.)
Was there ever a moment that as a growing kid or teenager I appreciated I hadn’t been getting sick that much lately?
I don’t think there was: “out of sight, out of mind”. Most adults, I suspect, don’t ever think about it either, until they run into oddities like kindergarten teachers getting sick frequently or they have kids themselves, and recall that “kids are walking petri dishes” (which is rather unkind to the petri dishes in question).
I was listening to an acquaintance, a retired school librarian, discussing her daughter’s first years as an elementary school teacher, and how she kept being absent for weeks due to illness. Wasn’t that a problem for her career? Most employers do not look kindly on employees absenting themselves at random for weeks. Oh no!, she explained, it’s ordinary and expected that these teachers, especially in their first years, will be absent constantly; and the school districts always ensure ample supplies of substitute teachers.
Getting sick is just part of the job, until you build up your immune system. That’s what being a kid, or a teacher, is like.
But perhaps we should tell young kids this more—that a reason to look forward to growing up, with all its downsides like jobs and taxes, is that for ~30 years (before aging starts catching up): you won’t be sick all the time, and it gets better.