Crunchy Mom: “The term crunchy mom is typically used to describe a mother or female caregiver who typically follows a natural lifestyle and incorporates it into their parenting. A crunchy mom attempts to avoid modern medicine, limits reliance on technology, and eats only organic foods.” (https://www.dictionary.com/e/slang/crunchy-mom/ ). While this may seem like a good approach to parenting, it can be quite harmful. Giving their children only the most organic foods, crunchy moms often unknowingly cause their children to develop eating disorders, such as orthorexia (the obsession with eating only healthy or “correct” foods) and others (anorexia, BED, etc.)
Along with the problem of causing eating disorders in their children, they are often against vaccinating their children, whether it be for Covid or the Flu. While it may seem like this only affects them and their children, it also has the potential to affect anyone they interact with, although that may not be many due to the growth of homeschooling their children in order to avoid the “indoctrination”. They not only affect anyone they interact with, but they also often have large followings on social media platforms such as TikTok and Instagram, allowing other people to follow their uninformed views on health and food. Using the “my body, my choice” tagline usually used by people who are pro-choice in terms of abortion, saying things like this about wearing masks and getting vaccinated. But things like this aren’t only affecting your body. While masks haven’t been the norm for a couple years now, the vaccines are still relevant.
We can see these women claiming that vaccines cause autism, have microchips, or other preposterous claims about things they hear from Facebook, but this is a deeper issue than just women choosing not to give their children basic healthcare. This is a new generation of children coming into the world without the proper immunities, without a proper understanding of the government, our country, or anything of importance. While crunchy moms are often very strict, I’ve come across some that vaccinate their children, send them to school instead of homeschooling, and teach them how to have healthy relationships with food. However, this is the minority of them. We as a society need to stop giving platforms to people who are spreading misinformation for their own personal gain, whether it’s intentional or not.
