Raising Healthy Children in Our Toxic Culture is Like Swimming Upstream

We live in a society that not only fails to protect our children's health, but actively makes them sick

Photo by Ksenia Chernaya/Pexels

I’m another exhausted parent, and no one wants to hear it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it’s tiring to raise children, we get it, enough already.

But actually, people don’t really get it. I know this because it only clicked for me very recently, and I’ve parented three children, starting with my stepson 18 years ago. I know this because what’s most exhausting about parenting is something we don’t really acknowledge.

It’s high time we did.

There’s no question that the early years of parenting are tiring, to say the least. It’s an acute, intensive exhaustion, like a leg cramp that hurts like hell but we know will eventually pass. 

Some parents wax nostalgic about these early years, and I am not one of them. Whenever I see young parents schlepping diaper bags and chasing after toddlers, I feel hugely relieved that my family can venture into the world without three dozen carefully packed necessities and without fear that a child may escape our clutches and dart into an oncoming car.

On the other hand, I understand the nostalgia because in those early years, we, the parents, are our child’s entire world. Maybe there’s a daycare provider or a nanny or another family member who spends time with our child, and we meticulously prep these interlopers with a long list of said child’s bowel rhythms, naptime preferences, and dietary requirements. As young parents, it is inconceivable to us that our child will one day consume things that we didn’t select or approve. It’s not just food they will consume without our knowledge. They will also become their own consumers of media, messages, and things.

And most of it will be very bad for them. Toxic, really.

If we care about our children’s physical, mental, and emotional health — which I would venture to guess most of us do — parenting becomes one long protracted fight against our cultural defaults. If we’re not consistently vigilant, it’s all too easy for our kids to stop moving their bodies in any context outside P.E., to develop rampant cravings for things that are decisively bad for them, and to focus obsessively on all the ways they don’t measure up to impossible physical standards.

This fight comes into much sharper focus during the adolescent years when kids lose their natural sense of self-assuredness and start to become obsessed with being “normal.” According to my adolescent daughter, it’s “normal” to subsist on a steady diet of junk food, to drive instead of walk places, to fall asleep watching TikTok videos, to spend weekends at Costco and Target, and to have a flat belly that you can show off with the crop tops that are apparently once again in fashion.

It’s not normal to eat wheat bread, to walk on the weekends, to own a phone with no apps, to shop mostly and only occasionally at thrift stores, and to have a healthy amount of body fat.

I have no desire to be one of “those moms” who forces her children to abstain from the birthday cupcakes because they’re not allowed processed sugar. But on the flip side, if I consistently go the path of least resistance and default to “normal,” my children stand a frighteningly high chance of developing depression, anxiety, diabetes, an eating disorder, an unhealthy body weight, or any combination thereof.

We live in a culture that not only fails to protect our children’s health, but actively works against it. It’s up to us, as parents, to swim upstream, with our often resistant children in tow.

That, my friends, is the crux of my exhaustion. And these, my friends, are the five central forces against which I am continually fighting:

1. Sugar and processed foods

“Everything in moderation” is my dietary motto, and I make a valiant attempt to put this motto into practice in my own home. My kids are allowed one reasonably sized bowl of chips after school and one reasonably sized treat after dinner. We convene each evening for a generally balanced and mostly nutritious home-cooked meal. I don’t make too much of a fuss about nutrition labels because I don’t want to model this behavior for my daughter (see: body image), but I am intentional about what foods we bring back from the grocery store.

Still, sugar finds a way to seep into our house, or if not our house, my children’s mouths. It’s friggin’ everywhere. It’s in the chocolate milk that our public school district inexplicably makes available to its students. It’s in the bags of gummy bears that a church uses to try to lure my kids to Jesus while they’re walking home from school. It sails from floats at parades and explodes from birthday piñatas and lurks in Gatorade at sports events and bursts through the seams of paper bags on Valentine’s Day.

Any one of these scenarios on their own, of course, is not that big a deal. But the compound effect is not negligible. We live in a country where nearly 20 percent of children aged two to 19 are obese and where diabetes in youth under 20 is expected to surge by 700 percent over the next few decades.

I occasionally attend birthday parties for one-year-olds, for which the parents have invested considerable energy into baking some kind of well-intentioned sweet potato cake because their baby’s body is a temple into which only breast milk and whole foods have flowed. I wonder if I should warn them about the tidal wave of sugar that is poised to engulf their precious bundle of joy. 

But I don’t want to be a spoilsport on their baby’s Big Day. Unfortunately, they will find out soon enough.

2. Built environment

Of course, it’s not just our diets that contribute to childhood obesity. It’s also the built environments of the neighborhoods where most of us raise our families.

When my family moved to our current hometown of Portland, Oregon, we fastidiously researched the Walk Scores of every house we toured because we didn’t own a car at the time. Our house’s score of 82 is far above the national average of 49 — and would also be far out of our price range today. Though most Americans want walkability, that’s not what most Americans get.

In fact, even though the 1990s found many of us disenchanted with the car-dependent, consumer-fueled suburbs that had been continually sprawling over the prior decades, they still kept sprawling. The frenzy resumed in earnest at the dawn of the 21st century, with suburbs growing three times as fast as cities during its first decade.

At the dawn of the century’s third decade, Realtor Magazine reported that “the number of home buyers shopping nationwide for suburban homes has jumped 42.1% since the pandemic began.” With the rise of remote work, the gutting of downtown office buildings, and increases in violent crime, the suburbs just might be staging yet another comeback.

Which, unless we dramatically reimagine how we build our suburbs, is too bad for us and even worse for our kids. They grow up with the notion that getting from point A to point B automatically involves a car. And, of course, they spend a lot of time sitting in said car.

Even in our eminently walkable neighborhood, my kids were two of only a dozen children who walked regularly to elementary school. And while I can’t say our kids have ever been enthusiastic about our “weekend walk” tradition — that is, until we start our walk, at which point we tend to all thoroughly enjoy ourselves — the vehemence of my daughter’s protests has reached new levels of intensity.

“Normal” families, she says, don’t walk places. And they especially don’t walk just for the sake of walking.

3. Screens and social media

There’s another reason why you rarely see kids out and about these days, roaming around in packs or playing in front of their homes. It’s because more and more of them are inside glued to screens.

Years ago, I watched my stepson, now 23, fall down a social media rabbit hole and, with some nudges from his mother’s Trump-supporting family, emerge on the alt right side of things — with a fully realized depressive disorder, to boot. My partner and I didn’t have much of a say as to when he got a phone, or how much time he spent on it, but we also weren’t quite yet aware of how evil — because really, there’s no other word — social media had become.

My stepson and his peers were the user testers, the generation of children who proved how easily young minds could get hooked on this stuff — and how much money there was to be made.

But now we’re so deep in, it’s hard to know how to claw our way out. My daughter has made repeated claims that she is the only one in her sixth-grade class without a smartphone. Independent research, conducted by me, has found this to be not entirely true, but it’s close. She says everyone spends recess talking about TikTok dances, and she feels left out.

GOP Rep. Mike Gallagher and I probably don’t see eye to eye on much of anything, but when he recently called TikTok “digital fentanyl,” I had to agree. Lest you think I’m exaggerating here, take it from Stanford psychiatrist Anna Lembke:

Social connection has become druggified by social-media apps, making us vulnerable to compulsive overconsumption. These apps can cause the release of large amounts of dopamine into our brains’ reward pathway all at once, just like heroin, or meth, or alcohol.

Like nearly all other social media platforms, TikTok is designed to leave the user continuously craving more; it bombards users with short, disparate pieces of information that destroy our ability to focus; and it serves up content based on what an algorithm has decided you’re most likely to respond to, regardless of whether or not that content may cause you harm or has any relationship to truth.

It’s partially about the intentionally addictive nature of social media, partially about the potentially harmful content, and partially about the social isolation endemic to its usage. This potent trifecta has devastating effects.

One study found that the 33 percent increase in depression amongst 8th through 12th graders between 2010 and 2015 “correlates with smartphone adoption during that period, even when matched year by year. In the same period, the suicide rate for girls in that age group increased by 65 percent.”

For now, my daughter has a not-so-smartphone, one that allows for texting and calling only. But still, I feel like I’m caught in a losing battle, not sure how much longer I can keep drawing the line.

4. Consumerism

It’s not only smartphones that make empty promises to improve the user experience of our lives. There’s always something new we can buy that will make everything better. 

Unlike a “normal mom,” I don’t buy much, partially because I hate spending money, partially because I care about the environment, and partially because we have a small house that can only hold so much.

Also, and perhaps most importantly, I know better. I don’t want my kids to become frenetic materialists who measure their self-worth through the quantity and quality of their things.

I distinctly remember thumbing through friends’ copies of Seventeen back in middle school, then setting aside the magazine and feeling overcome by an acute desire to go out and buy stuff. This was particularly unusual for me because I was a particularly unusual kid in that I didn’t care much for stuff. While writing my list for Santa, I used to sit and stare at the blank piece of paper, wracking my brain to think of a single thing I really wanted.

But marketing can be powerful, particularly for a 12-year-old who is suddenly feeling insecure and questioning everything she thought she knew. It didn’t take more than 10 minutes for those glossy pages to convince me that all my problems would be solved with just the right exfoliating face wash or hydrating shampoo.

My own adolescent daughter never struggled to make a list for Santa; in fact, at age seven she asked him for $90,000 and 100 pieces of jewelry. (Incidentally, seven was also the age at which she stopped believing in Santa.) 

Even though she rarely watches commercials, gets most of her clothes second-hand, and sleeps in the same bed I slept in growing up, our culture’s rampant consumerism has managed to seep through the cracks. My daughter’s dresser is somehow lined end to end with all the latest and greatest products that some YouTube video she saw at a friend’s house has convinced her will lead to lifelong fulfillment. She is intent on buying her way to self-worth, obsessed with the so-called problems that money + Target can supposedly solve.

And no matter how many “life-changing” things she manages to collect, she will always be hungry for more.

5. Body Image

Of course, the quest for products and things is intricately tied up in a culture that tells us we are never good enough. It was in middle school that I first began spending lots of time frowning into the mirror. For my daughter, the frowns began crinkling her brows at age 10. That’s when she made her first comment about being “fat,” even though she was a lean five feet of solid muscle.

But she was already sizing herself up, comparing herself to impossible standards of beauty, worrying about what others thought. I saw in her the slow grasping of “not good enough,” the pursuit of perfection she would never attain.

With AI-generated images and social media “glamor filters,” impossible standards of beauty are only getting more impossible. Studies show at age 13, 53% of girls are “unhappy with their bodies,” a percentage that grows to a staggering but unsurprising 78% by the time they reach 17. And by age 20, 13.2 percent of females will experience an eating disorder.

It all kind of makes me want to flee with my family to an off-grid community with a herd of slightly feral kids who never look in mirrors and entertain themselves with rocks and sticks.

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They say we’re overprotective, parents these days, and they are largely right. But we protect our children against the wrong things. We’re worried about letting them walk to school—which actually contributes to their physical health and helps them learn vital life skills—when they face far more risk in their own homes.

If we’re not vigilant, it’s far too easy for them to be exposed to ads that convince them of all the things they absolutely can’t live without, to filtered images of unhealthily skinny women who chirp on about thigh gaps, to bags of processed sugar-filled loot that came from who knows where, to druggified apps that make them feel shitty and lure them away from outdoor play.

What would parenting look and feel like if we didn’t have to work so goddamn hard to fight upstream against all the toxic behaviors and messages that our children swim in daily?

Well to start, given that every single trend cited here has become measurably worse since my own childhood, parenting might look and feel a little more like it did for my parents. That’s not to say my parents’ generation didn’t contend with its own challenges, but the fact that our children are getting progressively sicker is a telltale sign that something is very, very wrong.

If you compound this with everything else that’s gotten harder —for instance, finding childcare, affording shelter, and ignoring climate change — it’s no wonder that today’s parents are exhausted. 

I know, no one wants to hear it. But I’m going to keep talking. And I hope other parents will join the fray.