Keeping Your House Too Clean?

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May 08 2008

Keeping Your House Too Clean?

Published by danaprince at 9:23 am under Healthy Living Edit This

A nice clean house can feel like a haven but there are some suggestions that say that it is possible to be too clean, especially if you have small children. Little kids are like magnets to dirt and this is actually helpful for their immune system to a degree. Many parents notice that as soon as their kids are exposed to daycare or school they are constantly ill for the first little while. It’s possible that their home was too sterile which didn’t allow the kids to build up sufficient immunity.

This certainly isn’t permission to let everything go but it can help you relax your standards a little if you’ve been really anal about things, especially having a crawling or toddling child.

This isn’t to say that are homes shouldn’t be clean or that we want to expose our kids to germs. Little babies need protection from germs, especially in the early years but what this is saying is that the old adage of “You eat a pound of dirt before you die” isn’t always such a bad thing because your body, when exposed to a small amount of germs learns to cope with it. If you imagine your immune system like a muscle in the early years, you can see that little exercises in fighting off mild colds and coming into contact with irritants can be like a workout that makes it stronger. Living in a plastic bubble could make your immune system lazy.

We should strengthen our immune systems by what we eat and drink and keep our homes tidy and free of toxicity but by the same token, being anal about using hand sanitizer every five minutes and being obsessive compulsive about sterilization of the floor the house might not do your health any favors.

Lack of dirt and dust or lack of exposure to animal dander in the early years could cause an allergy because your child’s body won’t know how to react to it when it does come in contact with it. At the other end of the spectrum, too much overload on your body can result in an allergy as well.

So what should you do? Balance is important. Keep the house clean and tidy but loosen standards a little if you’ve felt panic rise in you at the sight of your toddler sharing their cookie with the family dog or at the sight of them sitting in the dust bin playing with the dirt after you’ve swept the floor. While you don’t want to expose your family to health risks, you can relax a little because minor things can actually help their bodies learn to fight off more serious problems in future.

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