Kids' Health and the Fire Season
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    kids as mirrors of family, community and ecological health

    Summertime is kid time. The kids are out of school, eager and freer to do what kids do best—play! According to Chinese Five Element theory, summer is the season of the Fire element, and Fire represents the joyful, playful, spontaneous, creative, childlike spirit in all of us.

    Summertime is kid time for everyone, whether you are eight months or eighty years old.

    How’s the health of your kid self? How much have you played lately? How often have you been silly? How strong and nourishing is your connection to your community? How rich is your daily diet in unconditional love and spontaneity? Do you rely on your children to bring these things into your life, or do you feel them welling up inside you like a spring, ready to be shared with as well as sparked by your kids? Do our schools value these qualities and nurture kids’ abilities to maintain and develop them as they grow? Never mind our high ideals—what does the way our schools, our communities, our nation, our world behave day-to-day say about the extent to which we cherish these aspects of life?

    When kids are sick or injured, we want nothing more than to “fix” whatever is “wrong”. Kids have a way of connecting us with our hearts (the heart is ruled by the Fire element, by the way) and our hearts break when we see kids dealing with pain or illness. Many of us are experiencing great distress because our kids seem beset by such a bewildering array of chronic health challenges: recurrent ear infections, asthma, allergies, obesity, mysterious headaches and joint pains, eating disorders, and learning and behavioral difficulties. We expend a lot of energy searching for physical solutions to our kids’ health challenges—new medications, exercise regimens, nutritional supplements, better diets.

    Exercise and diet are essential components of good health, for kids as well as adults. Medications, too, have their place.   But if we buy into our culture’s materialist and strictly individualist view of health and illness, we can easily miss connecting with the heart of healing. Even “holistic” health practitioners can easily fall into the trap of looking for the best “solution” to an individual child’s current health problem—the latest combination of supplements, the newest wonder diet, the herb of the month—without simultaneously exploring the layers of meaning embodied in children’s symptoms.

    Children’s small bodies are more susceptible than adults’ to nutritional deficiency and to the ill effects of environmental contaminants such as heavy metals and pesticides; similarly, they are often respond more rapidly and dramatically than adults to discord in their emotional and spiritual environment. Kids mirror how we live in our bodies (notice how often even very young children stand, sit or walk exactly like one of their parents?) and in our communities. Kids’ health problems are sensitive, often painfully truthful mirrors of the parts of ourselves—and the parts of life—we reject. Their health problems show us the shadow side of our individual, family, and community life.

    It is easier to give a child Ritalin to contain disruptive, hyperactive behavior than to ask how the prevalence of such symptoms relates to the way we organize our family, social, ecological and economic life or how we might change that organization. As parents, teachers, and/or caretakers of children, we often feel overwhelmed by the mechanics of daily life. We feel that we do not have time to consider such “esoteric” questions—we have to do what “works” in the short term. But in our hearts we know that true healing does not come from medications—or diet, or herbs—but from cultivating richness in our selves and bringing that richness into every aspect of our daily lives.

    The love and tenderness that children arouse—the powerful, irresistible way that they open our hearts—constantly prompt us to go beyond our apparent limits. In many cases, such love is the only thing that can give us the courage and resiliency to explore, confront, and transform the shadow sides of our individual, familial, and community life.   Our “sick” children can be our most powerful healers.