Sunscreen - evil or not evil

Like most people out there I worry about the damage the sun is doing to my skin and that of my children. I know the sun is more damaging today than when I was a child but, I wonder about the excessive use of sunscreen. We are being inundated with information telling us to slather up head to toe and make sure we dunk our kids in sunscreen else the big ol' mean sun will give us cancer. To translate, we're to slather our bodies with a chemical to protect us from a natural hazard. That's right up there with bug spray - egads! I just saw a mosquito, better get the deet and start inhaling those fumes lest I get bit.

It all seems a little ridiculous to me. We are trading one danger for another. It seems it is human nature to fling ourselves from one end of the pendulum to the other.

I've chosen a different tactic. I still use sunscreen - I do recognize that excessive sun exposure is detrimental - but I limit sun time instead of slathering myself and my children with a chemical. Oh, I know all the studies say it is perfectly all right to use sunscreen. But wasn't it just a few decades ago that DDT was deemed safe? Or herbicides and pesticides - seen a bee lately?

Most days, unless we're running errands, the kids have quiet time (what's quiet time you ask.....I'll post a blog on that little sanity scheme another time) during the hottest hours of the day. This keeps them in the house and out of the sun and limits the amount of time they are exposed to the sun. If, like today, the sun is beating down like we're the next Sahara, I put sunscreen on them and send them outside for a few hours. Once it is time to replenish they'll be tired and hungry and ready to come inside. I'll feed them and everyone will go for quiet time.

I'm still undecided about sunscreen, I think within 10 years we'll find out that just as many people are getting skin cancer from sunscreen as from the sun. But, in the meantime, I know that the sun is burning my children whereas it didn't burn me when I was a child. It's another case where the data in the experiment has changed so the method has to change. Compromise - limit the exposure to the sun and I can limit the exposure to sunscreen.

Limiting exposure to the sun doesn't need to translate to more screen time - a little creative thinking and we can achieve outside playtime with limited exposure to the sun. With that in mind, on the new house we are building we are adding two verandas, places where the kids can be "outside" yet still protected from the sun; and planting more trees in the backyard to provide shade.