October has been acknowledged as Youngsters’s Well being Month since 1960. Its origins are rooted in Little one Well being Day — first proclaimed by President Calvin Coolidge practically 100 years in the past in October 1928. This yr is my first yr celebrating Youngsters’s Well being Month as a grandmother. My grandson was born in August, and as all new grandmothers know, loving a grandchild renews your love for kids in a method that nothing else can.
In truth, I really like kids — plain and easy. Each youngster — no matter zip code and never simply these I depend amongst my household and buddies. My mother and father, each social employees, raised me with robust household and group values. Within the custom of the Episcopal Church, they taught me about defending kids and defending the Earth as God’s creation. Though I didn’t know the way to categorical it as a baby, I need my grandson and each youngster to develop up with the expectation I had of residing in a world the place they will stay in a wholesome neighborhood with clear water to drink and clear air to breathe.
The Air They Breathe, the Future They Inherit
Youngsters’s Well being Month reminds us about kids’s distinctive well being wants and encourages us to behave to guard them. Youngsters aren’t little adults. Their our bodies are rising and creating quickly, placing them at larger danger of speedy and long-term hurt from environmental threats like air air pollution and excessive climate. Sadly, we all know there are a lot of environmental threats confronting our youngsters—risks our youngsters inhale with each breath.
Regardless of a long time of progress in cleansing up the air, thousands and thousands of kids are nonetheless respiratory unhealthy ranges of air pollution generated by fossil-fueled automobiles, energy vegetation, oil and fuel operations, and more and more intense wildfire smoke. These risks start earlier than our valuable kids are born: when moms breathe an excessive amount of unhealthy air throughout being pregnant, their infants’ danger of preterm delivery, low delivery weight, and even stillbirth will increase.
These hostile delivery outcomes have implications for his or her well being throughout childhood and into maturity. This implies they’ve elevated dangers for bronchial asthma, neurodevelopmental issues, pediatric cancers, and grownup continual ailments like hypertension and diabetes. Worse but, for Black kids like my grandson and people kids in low-income households, they’re most certainly to undergo from the well being impacts of maximum climate and air pollution due to well being inequities. These bodily threats are exacerbated by damaging impacts on their psychological well being and well-being.
From Concern to Collective Motion
Air air pollution and the local weather disaster are inextricably linked. Greenhouse gases warmth the local weather, resulting in excessive temperatures and situations that intensify wildfires, which in flip improve native particle and ozone air air pollution. It’s a horrible cycle. Particle and ozone air pollution have been linked to well being harms from elevated bronchial asthma assaults and lung most cancers to coronary heart assaults, untimely births, and untimely demise. Each local weather change and air air pollution pose severe dangers to kids’s well being throughout crucial years of growth for little hearts, lungs, and brains.
Due to rollbacks, coverage adjustments, and funding clawbacks relative to defending kids’s well being, we live in a scary time. Candidly, I’m tempted to succumb to feeling hopeless and overwhelmed. Happily, I’m neither alone nor powerless. I’m joined by the 1.6 million members of Mothers Clear Air Pressure and different organizations that share the identical mission and objectives.
Tens of millions of kids are nonetheless respiratory unhealthy ranges of air pollution.
Becoming a member of others in collective motion strengthens my dedication and resolve to take motion. Nelson Mandela is quoted as saying, “The true character of a society is revealed in the way it treats its kids.” We, collectively, should show the worth we place on how we deal with our youngsters concerning their well being and the planet.
In celebration of Youngsters’s Well being Month and the tenth anniversary of Youngsters’s Environmental Well being Day, I’m difficult each mother, dad, caregiver, and particular person like me who loves kids to decide to becoming a member of me and 1000’s of others in defending our youngsters’s future. We’re telling our buddies, neighbors, household, and elected officers that we demand they help preserving our planet as a spot the place each youngster can benefit from the human rights of fresh air to breathe, clear water to drink, and a wholesome neighborhood to stay in.
Almeta E. Cooper, Mothers Clear Air Pressure Nationwide Supervisor for Well being Fairness, lends her experience in well being fairness and environmental justice to all facets of the group.
