Wednesday, 16 March 2016
As a parent you can often be made to feel like you’re
being too precious in your overwhelming desire to protect your newborn baby
from pain.
Like when
your friend says “Oh just warning you — little Jimmy has a bit of a cold.
Nothing major though so we can still come and visit you and bubs today.”
Or when
you meet at the park for a play date with healthy toddler and newborn in tow,
to find said play date has a cough and green snot running at full steam from
both nostrils.
Or when
your dinner date comes over and says “The kids won’t eat too much, sorry —
we’ve all had gastro all week.”
No, no
and no.
If you
have sick children, stay home. Don’t send them to kindy. Don’t come to play.
Don’t kiss and cuddle my children. Please don’t spread the germs — I don’t want
to spend a week working from home while caring for vomiting youngsters and
still paying for childcare. And I really do not want to spend the weekend in
bed because, what do you know, I got it too.
You may
think it is nothing. That some paranoid mums are silly like that, rushing off
to the doctors every five minutes and wrapping their kids in cotton wool — that
germs are everywhere, particularly in flu season, and you can’t keep them in a
bubble forever.
But all
you have to do is hear a horror story like that of UK mum Claire
Henderson, whose newborn daughter Brooke was kissed on the mouth — and
then spent five days in hospital after developing the herpes virus on her lips,
cheeks and chin.
But she
was lucky. The cold sore virus can be fatal for a baby under three months, as
was shown in Queensland just last year when Mackay baby Eloise Lampton
died from it, just a few short days after she was born.
“The
moral of the story is DO NOT let anyone kiss your newborn’s mouth, even if they
don’t look like they have a cold sore,” Claire Henderson wrote on social media.
“And if
someone had a cold sore, ask them to stay away until it has gone.”
Which
begs the question — why on earth would you visit a helpless, defenceless,
unimmunised little newborn with a cold sore? And why or why would you kiss her?
And on the lips, no less?
There is
no excuse for it.
For six
weeks, that tiny baby is unimmunised against most of the germs us mortals carry
around every day. To you it may just be a runny nose or an ugly sore on your
top lip. To that baby, to that baby’s family, it could mean the difference
between life and death.
We need
to properly respect a child’s right to good health.
I
recently tried to visit some good friends who had just had a baby, to be told —
could we possibly wait until after the baby’s six-week shots?
It’s not
something you hear of a lot, and I’m sure an approach that strict isn’t for
everyone — but you know what? Good on her for saying how she felt, instead of
politely agreeing to something you didn’t feel comfortable with, and then
dealing with the consequences.
We need
to stop looking at this as a new generation of over-protective parents wrapping
a child in cotton wool — it has to be seen as nothing more than what it is —
and that is the right thing to do.
Giving a
baby the best chance at life is your right — your responsibility actually — and
no one should make you feel guilty for expressing caution.
So no,
you do not kiss a newborn baby on the lips. No, you do not let sick children
near a new baby. And if you or your children aren’t immunised, then don’t come
for a visit.
We simply
can’t worry about being polite when our childrens’ lives are at risk.
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