Chickenpox Kids Party Like It's 1966!

Chickenpox parties.  You drag your kid to a hotbed of contagious disease with the hope that little Grover (or little Hilda, as the case may be) comes down with the illness himself  or herself.  Have some cake, share straws, have some high contact play, and go home.  Although I get the idea of trying to control bad things, this always struck me as a kinda of weird approach -   only because chickenpox actually has a non-negligible rate of very undesirable outcomes.  (Yes, I recognize that the goal was to spare Grover a bout of the pox at age 30 - the very age at which I managed to suffer this plague.)

I thought that the varicella vaccine had rendered these shindigs unnecessary.  Why introduce your child to a dangerous illness when you don't have to?  Silly me!  I underestimated what happens when you mix "shots are dangerous" anxiety with the nostalgia for old medicine.  What do you get, according to the Trib?  Chickenpox Parties in 2008!

Megan Cummins, a shiatsu therapist from Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood, said that at one party her children hesitated to share a drink box with the infected toddler, who had a runny nose and was covered in spots.  "My kids were sort of repulsed," Cummins said. She said her two older children attended three parties but never got infected. She still hopes to get them infected, but said that at times the parties felt awkward.

Awkward?  Aruably, it verges on abuse. Oh, those folks from Hyde Park.