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Mary and I got to spend some time with Rowan recently. She’s amazing! At 10 months now she’s crawling like a champ, pulling herself up on everything, babbling like a champ and everything goes into her mouth. It’s a joke that new parents sterilize everything for their first child, carefully rinse off stuff for their second, and if their lucky, maybe, wipe off some of the worst crud before giving a fallen toy back to their third. Kate, Andy, Mary and yes, now even I, have adopted a middle of the road approach, since there’s pretty strong evidence that child number two might be getting the best part of the deal. After all the time you’ve spent teaching your kids good hygiene, it seems that some of their “bad habits” might actually keep them from developing allergies. That’s right – a little dirt might be good for them.
One recent study showed that children who bit their nails and sucked their thumbs were less likely to suffer from allergies later in life. Other studies have shown that children who live on farms are far less susceptible to allergies and asthma. These studies support something called the “hygiene hypothesis” – when we have “too much hygiene,” it turns out to be a negative.
It’s believed that exposure to microbes and germs when we’re young helps our bodies to become accustomed to less than perfect conditions – and that helps us to build an immunity.
This theory might explain why it seems like so many more children today have allergies than children did a few decades ago. As modern society has evolved, we’ve been living in increasingly more sterile environments.
It isn’t a completely cut-and-dried situation in terms of determining what has caused the increase in allergies. There are other factors that could be at play, such as bacteria in your gut, whether or not a child is breast fed as an infant, or exposure to secondhand smoke.
What it means for parents is that you can relax your rules about cleanliness – at least to a certain extent.
Just about every parent has seen their child do something that struck them as pretty gross, but it isn’t something you should obsess over. That doesn’t mean you need to encourage your children to start licking the floor, but if they do, you don’t need to lose sleep over it, and a call to the pediatrician or an ER visit is not required.
We ought to begin modeling behavior for children that will make them less uptight about getting their hands dirty.
The parent that is constantly using hand sanitizer and lecturing the kids about washing their hands may be doing more harm than good.
That doesn’t mean the kids shouldn’t wash their hands before dinner, and it doesn’t mean that a parent should encourage a child to embrace PigPen as a role model. It’s just a matter of realizing that your child isn’t going to get sick if they stick their dirty fingers in their mouth from time to time.
There are some situations in which cleanliness should be maintained at the highest levels of course. Children should be taught to always wash their hands after using the bathroom. And if they’re visiting, for instance, a petting zoo, it’s important to clean up after petting the animals. Certainly, after contact with someone who’s ill, before interacting with someone whose immune system is not normal, and after touching and potentially toxic substances, a really good scrub is required … and of course before starting heart operations!
