Ever since Joanna Gaines welcomed her fifth child in July, she seems to be having the time of her life. The designer's popular HGTV series Fixer Upper has wrapped up, much to her fans' sorrow, and it's given her the opportunity to slow down and enjoy her family on their farm outside of Waco, Texas. Her Instagram feed has been peppered with pics of her kids on the farm and everyone has been loving them. Except for one recent post, weirdly enough. Joanna Gaines' new pic of baby Crew visiting the doctor got fans heated for the most absurd reason. It seemed almost as though no one could handle all of that bliss and just needed to ruin the party for no damn reason.
The 40-year-old designer and Magnolia cookbook author probably had no idea that she would stir up controversy with a simple picture of her adorable husband smiling down at their adorable baby. On Sep. 5, Joanna shared a sweet snap of husband Chip Gaines and their 2-month-old son Crew at the doctor's office with the caption, "Weigh in day at the doctor... @chipgaines always seems to make things better ❤️" What could be more innocuous than that, right? Wrong. Oh so wrong.
Please take a moment to look at this picture and figure out why people were upset. I'm guessing nothing is coming to mind, right? Well it seems that fans were worried Joanna might be vaccinating her son and decided to go on the offensive based on nothing more than this picture alone. Critics flooded her Instagram feed with fire and brimstone warnings about vaccinating baby Crew, despite the fact that neither Chip nor Joanna mentioned vaccines. One fan wrote:
Please don't vaccinate! If you already have, then research before letting doctors inject your child with poison in the future! Vaccines contain glyphosate and many other toxic ingredients that cause cancer and other side effects like asthma, autoimmune disease and SIDS!
Another fan wrote:
Please don't vaccinate that sweet baby with the toxic poison vaccinations
One follower even went so far as to insinuate that parents who might vaccinate their children must not love them:
Vaccines are dangerous and if people love their kids they won’t inject them with these poisons!
The debate raged on and on via Joanna Gaines' Instagram feed. I'm not sure how the designer managed to keep her calm and not simply disable comments, because it would have been tempting.
Maybe she just ignores it while rocking Crew on her porch and looking all Zen.
So here's what's so curious to me; why in the world were people preemptively attacking Joanna for vaccinating her child? That's setting aside the reality that vaccinating her child is her decision and no one else's business, of course. Also, remember she has four older children she's already been raising for the past 13 years? I feel like she already made her mind up about vaccines with her older four kids; Drake (age 13), Ella Rose (age 11), Duke (age 10), and Emmie Kay (age 8). So why bother getting involved at all?
I'm not going to get into the entire vaccination debate here because that's not really what this misguided criticism of Joanna Gaines. It's about choice, and the idea that people seem to believe social media feeds have given them the right to make decisions for other parents and make snap judgments about those decisions. Decisions that have absolutely nothing to do with them. You don't get to decide how anyone else raises their kids, folks. Not even when it's a famous person like Joanna Gaines.
