They launched informational and regulatory crusades against such health problems as smoking, venereal disease, AIDS, and obesity. Pick up any newspaper and you’re apt to find a story about these ‘public health crises.’ Those are all health problems, to be sure, but are they really public health problems?”20
When it comes to obesity, the problem is astonishingly complex, and there is no proven remedy. I will review the history of child welfare with an eye toward understanding the pediatric obesity problem.
Boaz doesn’t even agree that obesity is a matter for public policy consideration. “Let’s start using honest language,” he advises. A “legitimate public health issue,” Boaz explains, involves “consumption of a collective good (air or water) and/or the communication of disease to parties who had not consented to put themselves at risk. . . . [O]besity [is a] health problem . . . [a] widespread health problem . . . [but] not [a] public health problem.”21
WHILE WRITING this book, I’ve been asked too many times to count whether my attitude about overbearing government includes favoring parental choice as it relates to vaccines. The answer is no.
My view on vaccines mirrors my attitude about government intervention in general. I believe strongly in reasonable, effective, limited government involvement in the lives of private citizens, and only for public problems and crises that are in fact amenable to government-implemented solutions.
I’m a mom of four children, all of whom were vaccinated. I want everyone else to vaccinate their kids as well. And when the government mandates vaccines, everyone’s kids are protected. What is called “herd immunity” only works against contagious diseases like measles and whooping cough when more than 92 percent of the population is vaccinated. Parents who refuse to vaccinate choose to endanger others’ kids as well as newborns and those who are immunocompromised, and I want the government to penalize them. And yet, as Jimmy Kimmel noted in March 2015, the culture in some places, like Los Angeles, where he lives, has become inverted. Kimmel quipped, “Parents here are more afraid of gluten than they are of smallpox, and as a result, we’ve got measles, measles are back.”22
Kimmel was reacting to a health crisis triggered in December 2014 at Disneyland in Anaheim, California, when more than 100 people who were exposed to measles subsequently got sick. “The rate of growth [in measles cases] gives us a good idea about the percentage of people in the population who are immune,” explained Maimuna Majumder, a research fellow at Boston Children’s Hospital. A preliminary analysis “indicates that substandard vaccination compliance is likely to blame for the 2015 measles outbreak,” Majumder and her coauthors concluded in their research letter for JAMA Pediatrics.23
Measles, mumps, whooping cough, and other preventable illnesses have returned to the United States because of concentrations of parents opting not to immunize their kids and a compliant government allowing them to get away with it. It took the crisis in 2015 to get politicians and the public at large to focus pressure on what had by then proven to be too-lenient rules for opting out of the medically recommended vaccination schedule. States like California are finally rewriting legislation to reduce the number of acceptable personal exemptions in the hopes of stemming the tide.
What I find hard to understand is why in such a clear case of necessary government intervention, so many states and localities choose to be hands-off and allow parents not to vaccinate their children. Even President Obama opted for a more laid-back approach in the response to the measles outbreak, with White House Spokesman Josh Earnest telling reporters, “People should evaluate this for themselves with a bias toward good science and toward the advice of our public health professionals.” This is exactly the wrong place for government to be lenient, and it is especially maddening given the opposite situation in just about every other area of childrearing.
Now contrast the laissez-faire attitude toward vaccines with the harsh regulations that govern cases of pediatric obesity. The people who are hurt by obesity are the ones who are obese. The people who are hurt from low vaccination rates also include everyone in the population who is at risk of getting sick.
President Kennedy got this distinction exactly right.
We do not live in a regimented society where men are forced to live their lives in the interest of the state. We are, all of us, as free to direct the activities of our bodies as we are to pursue the objects of our thought. But if we are to retain this freedom, for ourselves and for generations to come, then we must also be willing to work for the physical toughness on which the courage and intelligence and skill of man so largely depend.24
How are parents to reconcile their own parenting values with those of an overbearing government? Many are fighting to remain independent, responsible parents, refusing to accept the yoke of an oppressive nanny state. We are living in a moment of great anxiety, but too often, in response, the state decides that personal decisions are better made by government fiat. I aim to celebrate the many Captain Mommies and Daddies out there who are working to reject government-issued parenting standards and are taking authority and responsibility for raising their own children. It will take a broad revolution to change the way we treat parents. No Child Left Alone will show that the change has already begun.
There Is a Tree That Stands
(Oyfn Veg Shteyt a Boym)
ITSIK MANGER
There is a tree that stands
And bows beside the road.
All its birds have fled away,
Leaving not a bird.
The tree, abandoned to the storm,
Stands there all alone:
Three birds east, and three birds west—
The others south have flown.
To my mother then, I say,
“If you won’t meddle, please,
I’ll turn myself into a bird
Right before your eyes.
All winter, I’ll sit on the tree
And sing him lullabies,
I’ll rock him and console him
With lovely melodies.”
Tearfully, my mother says,
“Don’t take any chances.
God forbid, up in the tree
You’ll freeze among the branches.”
“Mother, what a shame to spoil
Your eyes with tears,” I said,
Then, on the instant, I transformed
Myself into a bird.
My mother cried, “Oh, Itsik, love . . .
