Tonight's picture was taken in April of 2008. Three months before Mattie was diagnosed with cancer. As you can see, Mattie had one of his toy cars up on a tinker toy car lift. A lift Mattie put together and imagined on his own. Mattie may have seen one of our cars being fixed at some point, and took that image with him.
Quote of the day: The "hygiene theory," the idea is that early exposure to dirt, and to animals who maintain their link to the earth's microbial fecundity, trains our developing immune systems to handle stressors large and small and tamps down the immune system's occasional penchant for overreaction. ~ Melissa Healy
My mom sent me the article entitled, Does exposure to animals during childhood buffer the body's response to stress as adults? The title captured both of us, since we love animals. However, the article left me with more questions than answers since I wasn't sure what was the real focus of this article. Was the article calling attention to the differences between living in a city versus living in a rural area? Was the article trying to establish that having a pet in one's formative years is helpful to one's overall ability to manage stress? Or is it that exposure to animals boost our immune response and gives us the ability to physically handle exposure to irritants in our environment? Are we talking about managing the biological response to stress (with the release of cortisol) or the psychological (anxiety, depression, etc)?
I gathered the article was referring to both the physical and psychological responses to stress and I found that for the most part men (as this was the gender assessed in the German study) who grew up on a farm with livestock were able to lower their stress related inflammatory response and return to a baseline stress level quicker than us city folks. But what explains this? The researchers claim that these two cohorts of men share many similarities.
In fact, the article stated: The study was very small, with only 20 young men in each group. But the researchers found the two groups well matched on a wide range of socioeconomic background factors and childhood stressors, as well as in their past and present states of mental and physical health. There was this difference, however: compared to urban participants, significantly more of the subjects who had grown up in rural areas had regular contact with pets and/or farm animals during adulthood.
The "or" above provides me with even more confusion. So is the rural person who had no pets growing up, but was exposed to live stock as an adult have the same level of strength, health, and laid back nature, as the rural person who had exposure to pets as a child? This article seems to be mixing so many variables that I am not ultimately sure what it is trying to tell me. Other than perhaps exposure to animals strengthens our immunity as they carry dirt and other microbes.
The article to me focuses on the biological basis of stress, but what about the psychological nature of being in the presence of an animal? What are the long term benefits of this? This is far more subtle and hard to tangibly quantify. All I know however, is both Peter and I grew up with animals in our lives. I do not think it helped my immunity to allergens what so ever as an adult and therefore the hygiene theory gets blown right out of the water for me. Yet I do think exposure to animals as a child provides a very real psychological benefit and I am not surprised that the article ends by stating, "Young adults who had a pet as a child were more empathetic, more prone to choosing helping professions, and "more oriented toward social values" than were young adults who'd grown up without pets."
What saddens me however, is there are many children growing up today without any kind of pet. Mainly because of over programmed schedules, the cost of maintaining a pet, the responsibility, and lack of freedom that occurs with having a dog for example. Yet I would say that one learns a great deal from caring for something that is dependent upon you, and it ranks right up there with learning a school subject. Because unfortunately the school subject won't get you through the complexities of life, but the life skills one obtains from caregiving, lasts a lifetime.
Does exposure to animals during childhood buffer the body's response to stress as adults?
http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-pets-cities-stress-20180501-story.html
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