The Great Indoors
Ticks and mosquitoes are the new backyard bogey monsters. In the fight to keep our kids safe, are we ruining childhood in New England?
Summer. New England. School’s out at last. Finally the kids are free to fling open the doors and pitch themselves headlong into our great wilderness—fields, forests, dunes.
Of course, they’ve first wrestled into long-sleeved shirts, pulled on pants and crammed the cuffs into their socks. They’ve been doused with deet, and they’ve been instructed to keep to the paved road, the short grass, and the middle of the forest path. Brush, swamps, and low-lying areas are off limits. Other than that, hey, kids, it’s summertime! Go crazy.
Across the state this month, children are stepping from the schoolhouse door into a more sinister kind of summer vacation than their parents remember, thanks to two tiny critters that have invaded our physical and psychic space.
We speak of the Borrelia burgdorferi bacteria that causes Lyme disease, carried from the woods to the doorsteps of suburbia by the deer tick, and of eastern equine encephalitis, an often fatal virus borne aloft by mosquitoes that favor birds in swamps and marshes of the southeastern part of our state. The Lyme disease rate, climbing for 15 years in Massachusetts, had reached nearly three times the national average according to the most recent numbers. And while eastern equine encephalitis, or EEE, may be rare, it can be fatal.
Instead of gossip, parents at town ball fields and school auditoriums swap stories of the preschooler who died, and the healthy grade schooler who found himself unable to walk without crutches thanks to Lyme disease. They fret about stories of teenagers with heart damage, middle schoolers with learning disabilities, and little kids with migraines, all caused, the rumors go, by bug bites.
Amid the onslaught of anxiety, some moms and dads are pulling their kids out of day camp and taking a pass on Boy Scout sleepovers. They’re ruling out school-sponsored field trips, and forgoing hallowed childhood traditions like outdoor games of hide-and-seek.
Parents are switching their positions on deet for kids and pesticides for lawns from an emphatic “no” to a resigned “yes.” Cities and towns are opting back into mosquito-control programs they once voted to quit, and, in some cases, school districts are holding recess indoors, closing playing fields, and moving the location of high school football games.
There are the parents who feel truly panicked, like one North Shore mom, herself diagnosed with Lyme disease, who dreads the coming of the warm weather. “I don’t know how I am ever going to get through this spring and summer with the children, knowing what I now know about this hideous disease,” she says. There are stories of a few parents, convinced that Massachusetts doctors are missing diagnoses of Lyme disease, driving their children hours to specialists in Connecticut and New York and keeping them on antibiotics.
Then there are the parents who just say no to the outdoors altogether, like the mom in southern New Hampshire who wouldn’t let her son walk to the end of the driveway to get the mail last summer after a local 20-year-old died from eastern equine encephalitis. Some families are even thinking twice about getting dogs that could bring ticks home.
“It’s very much different than when I was a kid,” sighs Liz Leonard, a mother of four whose family summers in Duxbury (mosquitoes!) and lives the rest of the time in a wooded area (ticks!) in Exeter, NH. “I don’t think my parents thought about any of this—EEE, Lyme disease, sun exposure. It’s part of my day-to-day thinking as a parent, and it affects the way I let my kids conduct their lives outdoors.” For this new generation of New England children, tromping unprotected through the wilderness—or even the backyard—is something kids used to do, back before we knew better, like going to the beach without sunscreen, riding a bike without a helmet, or traveling in a car without a seatbelt.
But in the understandable push to keep our kids healthy, we may be altering the essence of what it’s always meant to be a kid in New England. We may be keeping children safe, but in exchange for the security we’re sacrificing a bit of their spirit.
WHILE EASTERN EQUINE encephalitis is rare—there were four reported cases in Massachusetts last year, two of them fatal—Lyme disease is everywhere. It has marched its way north from Connecticut and the Cape, northeast from the Connecticut River Valley, and east from upstate New York. The state Department of Public Health says the number of reported cases has increased in 10 of the previous 15 years, exceeding 2,200 last year. Richard Pollack, a researcher at the Harvard School of Public Health, says it’s only a matter of time until every community in the state, including Boston, has Lyme disease–infected deer ticks.
If the prospect of having a child contract a disease that can cause serious, long-term joint, heart, and nervous system problems isn’t alarming enough, some parents fear that local pediatricians are misdiagnosing the disease. Particularly in communities that have been hit hard by Lyme disease, some parents are questioning nearly every aspect of medical thinking. They say the standard courses of antibiotics are ineffectual and too brief; that doctors, particularly pediatricians, are too slow to test for Lyme disease; and that the tests sometimes miss actual cases. They’re convinced that the illness can cause a host of long-term problems in children: migraines, stomachaches, fatigue, and cognitive impairment. “There’s a lot of suspicion out there that a lot more people have Lyme disease than fit the definition,” says Lisa Dorval, a Newbury mother of three. Dorval and her daughter both have been treated for Lyme disease.
Most of the medical community disagrees. “Pediatricians in this area are well aware of Lyme disease. It is almost always an easily treatable disease, and it very seldom leads to chronic illness in children,” insists Cody Meissner, chief of pediatric infectious diseases at Tufts–New England Medical Center. “The one problem is the great deal of misinformation that’s out there on the Internet that’s leading people to believe that if a child is not doing well in school, or is sleepy, or has a very nonspecific list of vague symptoms, then they have Lyme disease.”
Valid or not, the fear of Lyme disease has transformed the brushy New England landscape—those woods so lovely, dark, and deep—into something altogether more sinister.
AS NEW ENGLANDERS, part of who we are has to do with where we live, with our dunes, rocky meadows of waist-high wildflowers, hidden streams, boggy swales, and crumbling stone fences. When those private places, already under siege from the relentless march of suburbia, become off-limits to our kids, we sacrifice a little bit of our character as well.
Richard Louv, author of Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder, says the benefits of giving kids unstructured time in the natural world include reduced stress, increased creativity, sharper observation skills, a longer attention span, a better ability to cooperate, even a decrease in the signs and symptoms of ADD. Most important is the concept of wonder, says Louv, a visiting scholar at the Heller School for Social Policy and Management at Brandeis University. Spirituality is anchored in wonder, he points out, and a sense of it in nature is a central building block of many of the world’s religions. “What happens to the child’s spirit when he’s away from nature?” he asks.
Carol Decker remembers wonder. Now director of the Ipswich River Wildlife Sanctuary, Decker has been leading kids into the woods for 20-plus years. “We used to go off in the woods and lie down with the kids on the forest floor and have them just listen,” Decker recalls, marveling at the recklessness of it all. “Now, the idea of lying down in the forest or a field with a kid…” She trails off. It’s unimaginable.
And then there’s that most quintessential of New England childhood activities: jumping in piles of bright autumn leaves.
“Oh, the leaf piles!” laments Sue Stasiuk, a West Newbury mother of three. “It didn’t even dawn on me that leaves were an issue until my nephew came out of a pile with, like, five ticks on him.”
Stasiuk gets a little sad comparing her own childhood, spent roaming in the woods and rolling in the grass, with her children’s more controlled exposure to the wild. “It’s hard. I try not to say, ‘Don’t go into the woods, don’t go into the meadow,’” she says. “But then when they do, I’m full of anxiety.”
Of course, they’ve first wrestled into long-sleeved shirts, pulled on pants and crammed the cuffs into their socks. They’ve been doused with deet, and they’ve been instructed to keep to the paved road, the short grass, and the middle of the forest path. Brush, swamps, and low-lying areas are off limits. Other than that, hey, kids, it’s summertime! Go crazy.
Across the state this month, children are stepping from the schoolhouse door into a more sinister kind of summer vacation than their parents remember, thanks to two tiny critters that have invaded our physical and psychic space.
We speak of the Borrelia burgdorferi bacteria that causes Lyme disease, carried from the woods to the doorsteps of suburbia by the deer tick, and of eastern equine encephalitis, an often fatal virus borne aloft by mosquitoes that favor birds in swamps and marshes of the southeastern part of our state. The Lyme disease rate, climbing for 15 years in Massachusetts, had reached nearly three times the national average according to the most recent numbers. And while eastern equine encephalitis, or EEE, may be rare, it can be fatal.
Instead of gossip, parents at town ball fields and school auditoriums swap stories of the preschooler who died, and the healthy grade schooler who found himself unable to walk without crutches thanks to Lyme disease. They fret about stories of teenagers with heart damage, middle schoolers with learning disabilities, and little kids with migraines, all caused, the rumors go, by bug bites.
Amid the onslaught of anxiety, some moms and dads are pulling their kids out of day camp and taking a pass on Boy Scout sleepovers. They’re ruling out school-sponsored field trips, and forgoing hallowed childhood traditions like outdoor games of hide-and-seek.
Parents are switching their positions on deet for kids and pesticides for lawns from an emphatic “no” to a resigned “yes.” Cities and towns are opting back into mosquito-control programs they once voted to quit, and, in some cases, school districts are holding recess indoors, closing playing fields, and moving the location of high school football games.
There are the parents who feel truly panicked, like one North Shore mom, herself diagnosed with Lyme disease, who dreads the coming of the warm weather. “I don’t know how I am ever going to get through this spring and summer with the children, knowing what I now know about this hideous disease,” she says. There are stories of a few parents, convinced that Massachusetts doctors are missing diagnoses of Lyme disease, driving their children hours to specialists in Connecticut and New York and keeping them on antibiotics.
Then there are the parents who just say no to the outdoors altogether, like the mom in southern New Hampshire who wouldn’t let her son walk to the end of the driveway to get the mail last summer after a local 20-year-old died from eastern equine encephalitis. Some families are even thinking twice about getting dogs that could bring ticks home.
“It’s very much different than when I was a kid,” sighs Liz Leonard, a mother of four whose family summers in Duxbury (mosquitoes!) and lives the rest of the time in a wooded area (ticks!) in Exeter, NH. “I don’t think my parents thought about any of this—EEE, Lyme disease, sun exposure. It’s part of my day-to-day thinking as a parent, and it affects the way I let my kids conduct their lives outdoors.” For this new generation of New England children, tromping unprotected through the wilderness—or even the backyard—is something kids used to do, back before we knew better, like going to the beach without sunscreen, riding a bike without a helmet, or traveling in a car without a seatbelt.
But in the understandable push to keep our kids healthy, we may be altering the essence of what it’s always meant to be a kid in New England. We may be keeping children safe, but in exchange for the security we’re sacrificing a bit of their spirit.
WHILE EASTERN EQUINE encephalitis is rare—there were four reported cases in Massachusetts last year, two of them fatal—Lyme disease is everywhere. It has marched its way north from Connecticut and the Cape, northeast from the Connecticut River Valley, and east from upstate New York. The state Department of Public Health says the number of reported cases has increased in 10 of the previous 15 years, exceeding 2,200 last year. Richard Pollack, a researcher at the Harvard School of Public Health, says it’s only a matter of time until every community in the state, including Boston, has Lyme disease–infected deer ticks.
If the prospect of having a child contract a disease that can cause serious, long-term joint, heart, and nervous system problems isn’t alarming enough, some parents fear that local pediatricians are misdiagnosing the disease. Particularly in communities that have been hit hard by Lyme disease, some parents are questioning nearly every aspect of medical thinking. They say the standard courses of antibiotics are ineffectual and too brief; that doctors, particularly pediatricians, are too slow to test for Lyme disease; and that the tests sometimes miss actual cases. They’re convinced that the illness can cause a host of long-term problems in children: migraines, stomachaches, fatigue, and cognitive impairment. “There’s a lot of suspicion out there that a lot more people have Lyme disease than fit the definition,” says Lisa Dorval, a Newbury mother of three. Dorval and her daughter both have been treated for Lyme disease.
Most of the medical community disagrees. “Pediatricians in this area are well aware of Lyme disease. It is almost always an easily treatable disease, and it very seldom leads to chronic illness in children,” insists Cody Meissner, chief of pediatric infectious diseases at Tufts–New England Medical Center. “The one problem is the great deal of misinformation that’s out there on the Internet that’s leading people to believe that if a child is not doing well in school, or is sleepy, or has a very nonspecific list of vague symptoms, then they have Lyme disease.”
Valid or not, the fear of Lyme disease has transformed the brushy New England landscape—those woods so lovely, dark, and deep—into something altogether more sinister.
AS NEW ENGLANDERS, part of who we are has to do with where we live, with our dunes, rocky meadows of waist-high wildflowers, hidden streams, boggy swales, and crumbling stone fences. When those private places, already under siege from the relentless march of suburbia, become off-limits to our kids, we sacrifice a little bit of our character as well.
Richard Louv, author of Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder, says the benefits of giving kids unstructured time in the natural world include reduced stress, increased creativity, sharper observation skills, a longer attention span, a better ability to cooperate, even a decrease in the signs and symptoms of ADD. Most important is the concept of wonder, says Louv, a visiting scholar at the Heller School for Social Policy and Management at Brandeis University. Spirituality is anchored in wonder, he points out, and a sense of it in nature is a central building block of many of the world’s religions. “What happens to the child’s spirit when he’s away from nature?” he asks.
Carol Decker remembers wonder. Now director of the Ipswich River Wildlife Sanctuary, Decker has been leading kids into the woods for 20-plus years. “We used to go off in the woods and lie down with the kids on the forest floor and have them just listen,” Decker recalls, marveling at the recklessness of it all. “Now, the idea of lying down in the forest or a field with a kid…” She trails off. It’s unimaginable.
And then there’s that most quintessential of New England childhood activities: jumping in piles of bright autumn leaves.
“Oh, the leaf piles!” laments Sue Stasiuk, a West Newbury mother of three. “It didn’t even dawn on me that leaves were an issue until my nephew came out of a pile with, like, five ticks on him.”
Stasiuk gets a little sad comparing her own childhood, spent roaming in the woods and rolling in the grass, with her children’s more controlled exposure to the wild. “It’s hard. I try not to say, ‘Don’t go into the woods, don’t go into the meadow,’” she says. “But then when they do, I’m full of anxiety.”
Originally published in Boston magazine, June 2006
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