I have an impressive friend. She fell in love with evidence-based health care, arranged her college career and now motherhood around learning to read studies and statistics, and she delights in figuring out what exactly the best and most recent research says on, say, using toothpaste for a child under two. Then she does it.
I bring this up because with the warm spring weather comes (a drumroll, please) sunscreen season! Sadly, I do not have the educational background or mental rigor left to actually inspect the studies on sunscreen use. I just have a naturally suspicious nature and the remnants of philosophical/theological education. This leads me to doubt whether I should slather my child with SPF 100 before going out to get the mail.
Quite apart from whether it's the best use of our time and money, I just wonder whether it's good to insist that every member of a population ritually put on commercially-produced chemicals daily. I saw a headline of a study saying that skin cancer rates have actually gone up since sunscreen use started. Because of the sunscreen? Because people thought it was okay to stay out way longer if they had sunscreen on? Because those people drank too many cokes and it made them more sensitive? Or was the headline completely bogus? I don't know.
This is the whole question of wisdom. How do I parent properly in a world of imperfect information and a whole lot of limits? My dad always said, "The only thing you can't go overboard on is Jesus Christ." He was specifically talking about theology, but I think the principle holds across pretty much everything. I think C. S. Lewis was getting at the same thing when he said some things are a duty to maybe die for, but not to live for - like serving in a war or practicing lifesaving. You may die for that duty, but it shouldn't consume your every waking thought and affection. And Aristotle, of course, was all about virtue being finding the golden middle path between falling off into error on either side.
I could refuse to sunscreen Meg, ever, and cover her with trendy coconut oil (all those health benefits!) so she could get really tan and smell like summer all the time. Or I could sunscreen her every morning just in case we poke our noses out of doors.
The best I've come to, and you might disagree, is that we put on sunscreen when we're going to be outside for a significant length of time. I figure, when experts discover that excessive sunscreen use causes [whatever], we won't have used it excessively. And in the meantime, we won't get many sunburns. Because nobody likes crunchy red skin.
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4 comments:
sounds like sound reasoning to me. that's what we do too. And so far, no sunburns on anybody. only freckles. :-)
How fun to see your thoughts on sunscreen and wisdom. Sounds like quite a reasonable approach to me too :) I think parenting, more than anything else is really impressing on me the need for wisdom.
On a related note though, I am planning on blogging about sunscreen in the near future! hehe... hopefully I can keep my biases in check since I hate sunscreen.
"...we put on sunscreen when we're going to be outside for a significant length of time."
That's reasonable, although I tend to err toward the skip-sunscreen-and-seek-shade side.
Interestingly, Jonathan, one large survey found that people who sought shade or wore long sleeves were more likely to have a vitamin D deficiency than those who wore sunscreen (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22045154). I thought that was curious, since that wouldn't have been what I would have predicted!
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