Are We Creating Fragile Adults by Shielding Them and Our Children From Adversity?
What the idea of “anti-fragility” tells us about why university students increasingly see free speech as potentially dangerous to their physical safety.
In the 1990s, parents were told to stop giving their young children peanut butter. The purpose of this recommendation was to reduce peanut allergies later in life. Unfortunately, this advice was not backed by any firm science.
But, experts also didn’t know whether introducing certain foods early in life was a good idea. Enter Gideon Lack, Professor of Paediatric Allergy at King’s College London. He set out to test the outcomes of early exposure to peanuts.
In 2010, Lack recruited 640 children who were already exhibiting allergies to eggs and split them into two groups. He asked parents of the first group to avoid giving peanuts to their children for their first 5 years of life, which aligned with UK guidelines at the time. He asked parents of the second group to feed their children peanuts every week.
Five years later, the outcome of the study shook the foundations of the field. Introducing peanuts into the diets of these young children decreased the risk of a peanut allergy by 70–86%. As a result of this study, some guidelines now recommend introducing peanuts early into the diets of children, a complete reversal of the prevailing “wisdom” only two decades earlier.
What happened? Well, we perceived harm to children – peanut allergies – and supposed that the best way to protect them was to avoid peanuts. The truth, however, was that this made matters worse. Avoidance was making children fragile.
By now, this knowledge may have permeated through society and found its way to you. But, while many of us no longer fear feeding young children snacks containing peanuts, the avoidance strategy is still alive and well, in particular on college and university campuses across the United States, Canada, and United Kingdom.
Most of us genuinely want to take care of our children or the young people in our care, like students. We want to do right by them and give them the best chance of having a…
