If you were lucky enough to have a mother growing up, there are a few moments you’ll probably remember. In the middle of the night, stumping over from your bedroom to admit “I frew up”. The ceremonial bringing out of the sick bucket. A cold flannel on the forehead, Savlon on the grazed knee.
In those moments, your mother not only knows best, but becomes a sort of goddess. Against the fevers, blocked noses and nettle-stung shins of childhood, she wields a mystical healing power — the ability to kiss it better, to ordain that you’ll be “right as rain” in the morning (and you always are). This relationship rests on a limitless bank of trust, the ultimate vulnerability and the ultimate faith.
But what if your mother is not worthy of it? What if, having recently emerged from a global pandemic, she is now at odds with your family doctor, and mistrusts the mysterious adults who administer jabs at hospitals? What if she now represents a gatekeeper to things that might help, or even save you, from syrupy sweet Calpol to a vaccine preventing a bout of measles that might kill you?
This is life for the children of “crunchy mums”, so called because of the hippy, molar-cracking-granola world they emerged from. They congregate on anonymous forums, on Facebook, Reddit and Mumsnet, swapping advice on raising a child under the radar of mainstream medicine. One mother asks for tips on how to lie to doctors about her children not having had their vaccines. Another’s 17-year-old daughter begs her for the Covid jab; she is told to coax her out of her mainstream-media brainwashing and push “homeopathic prophylaxis” instead. “All the protection, none of the risk,” the comment says. Another woman asks how to treat her four-year-old with meningitis, whom she refuses to take to hospital. “Is this necessary?” she says of heading straight to A&E. “I am over Covid politics.”
On a different forum, a mother worries about the prevalence of measles in her son’s school; he is not vaccinated. “Stay confident in your decisions. Don’t let fear manipulate you,” comes the soothing reply. In one nannying forum, a woman tells of a mum who refuses to let her daughter carry an Epipen despite being fatally allergic to bananas. Instead, a “homeopathic salt” is kept in the house for emergencies. Another posts a picture of her three-year-old’s teeth — or what remains of them; they are all but completely decayed thanks to the misguidance of a “holistic dentist”. The mother now wants to do “what’s best” for her toddler, to relieve her pain, but it seems a little too late.
The Crunchy Mum phenomenon might appear, to most observers, as utter selfishness masquerading as care. This is certainly how I see one such “TikTok influencer” whose sister-in-law writes a warning post on Reddit exposing her for making videos about her “amazing and perfect” home births, assisted by an Amish midwife with “no official medical training”. Her fifth child, we are told, was delivered in a traumatic episode involving life-threatening pre-eclampsia and an admission to hospital — but the influencer “absolutely will not disclose” these facts to her followers, denying having had life-saving mainstream medical treatment to continue pushing her all-natural brand.
Spending a little time on these message boards, one gets the impression that these women — and it is almost exclusively women — are motivated not by selfishness, but by a surfeit of paranoid love. A couple of seams run through the discourse. The first is a hangover from woo-woo communal and natural-living circles of the Sixties and Seventies; it is all about lentils, flax seeds and coconut oil. This is where a lot of Crunchy Mums seem to start; after all, what can be so wrong with raising your child in the bosom of Mother Nature? There is an organic feminist flavour to it all, slightly witchy, vaguely empowering and ultimately quite harmless.
But the second seam is where the problems begin. It seems unlikely that the alt-Right homesteader mentality can coexist so comfortably with the dippy softness of the sandal-wearing Mother Earth sisterhood, but that confluence, the coaxing from concerned mother to anti-Big State freedom fighter, is at the heart of Crunchy Mum ideology. A few weeks or months among aluminium-deodorant-dodging acolytes online sends you hurtling down a pipeline of classic tropes — a distrust of Big Pharma, an aversion to vaccines, a suspicion of mainstream education.
There is a distinct hierarchy to these forums, where even quotidian questions are met with a barrage of replies which jostle to be the most extreme, the most radically sage. Mothers out-do each other with “well actually” correctives informing forum-lurkers that, in fact, you might be killing your child with radioactivity from baby monitors, seed oils or whatever else. Women bond over how they are shunned by other mothers at the school gates; they delight in the digital garrison they have formed, the spite of it all. If children see their mothers as a sort of magician, a healing goddess, then the cultists see themselves as the chosen ones.
This anxious-but-smug fatalism is nowhere clearer than in the big-ticket forums of Crunchy Mum culture: the autism boards. Here, mothers advise one another on “detoxing” their children through natural methods, which promise to see “autism characteristics improving or going away completely”. This process involves overhauling the diet, introducing supplements, and for some reason getting chiropractors involved. You must junk pesticides, preservatives and artificial colours. And give your child Epsom salt baths. One mother reassures another that her five-year-old has “lost” his autism diagnosis by cutting out “gluten and casein”. When the original poster expresses concern that this strict diet would remove some of the greatest pleasures from her little boy’s life, she is scolded: “The changes you make now can impact the rest of his life.”
The link between “alternative medicine” and obsessions with autism is not new. In 1998, Andrew Wakefield, a former physician, published a study in respected medical journal The Lancet linking the MMR jab to autism. Though the research was based on a study of only 12 children, it quickly became accepted that gastrointestinal inflammation from the vaccine caused developmental disorders. It sparked the first major wave of what would become a global and recurring anti-vax movement. The paper was ultimately discredited — The Lancet retracted it in 2010 — and Wakefield was disgraced. The fable is by now so familiar, but nonetheless many parents are still determined to believe it.
Why? The appeal of this theory is that it gives parents a sense of control, which saves them from the bleak uncertainty of genetic fate while conferring blame on those who didn’t try “hard enough”. There is great comfort in the belief that the destiny of the person you love most in the world is not random, but in fact entirely dependent on the sacrifices you are willing to make for them. You are determined to face censure from your community, to smilingly nurse them through bouts of mumps and rubella, to become the heroine of your own family story, to save them. If anything, the controversy of your beliefs only burnishes your heroism.
There are significant spiritual overtones to this martyred maternity. Crunchy Mums represent a slippage between real and mystical lives; they are the modern continuation of a medieval thought system which held that left-handed children represented something sinistra, devilish, and that harsh correctives could drive the dark out. In one forum, this connection is taken to an extreme in the context of — what else? — the Covid vaccine: “Don’t take it under any circumstances,” a mother says. “The mark of the beast is an unforgivable sin and you will get grievous sores all over your body… Plus the shot changes your DNA — writing lucifer (shot contains luciferace) [sic] all over it. Hell is not worth it. Plus the definition of pharmacia is spells, witchcraft, potions. [The] Bible WARNS against witchcraft and seeking such things.” This is worth unpacking. Luciferase is a family of proteins that, from the Latin, bear light (produce photons) — so are used as bioluminescent markers. These harmless, useful proteins are used in a variety of common medical applications, but not the Covid vaccine. That this woman has combined fundamental medical misunderstanding with earnest spiritual sentiment crowns her Crunchy Mum to end all Crunchy Mums.
Groomed by others to leap from well-meaning woo-woo to paranoid extremism, Crunchy Mums are a growing army. But it is one thing asking how to make soap out of your own breast milk, and quite another to give your baby botulism. These children are living the same embattled lives as those who, centuries earlier, would have grimaced through back-room exorcisms, huffing the acrid smell of burning sage from the local warty witch, getting leg cramp from sitting in a salt circle until your deformity is cured. And for the mothers, the same ancient affliction: guilt, overwhelming love — you will and must do anything to save your child. But what if rather than saving them, you’re condemning them?
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Source: UnHerd Read the original article here: https://unherd.com/