Microbes are our children’s friends. If they don’t get their fair share as youngsters, they are likely to end up with an underdeveloped immune system.
I was thinking about this as I watched our grandson sitting in the dirt with a young kangaroo, petting it and being licked in the face.
Initially, I was worried about this and then, remembering that as a 4-year-old this was good for him for all sorts of reasons, I moved to worrying about the kangaroo’s claws and hind legs instead.
After a rinse of the hands under the cold tap, while I wondered if perhaps I should have brought a hand sanitiser with us, we moved on to lunch.
There’s a school of thought, with strong scientific backing, that we are being too clean and taking too many precautions to protect our children from germs.
For some parents, egged on by commercial interests, it’s become an over-the-top war against bacteria.
It is implied that we aren’t good parents or, more specifically good mothers, if we aren’t keeping the household protected from the nasties that invade it.
And yet we need a good balance of "germs" or "bugs" or bacteria in our system to be healthy.
We forget, or perhaps don’t realise, that our bodies are naturally covered in bacteria.
Playing with pets and sand and dirt and interacting with the bugs of others is essential for full development of the immune system.
Just as their brains need stimulation and input for proper development, so do their immune systems.
There’s strong evidence to support the view that such exposure protects against a range of allergies including asthma and eczema as well as auto-immune and other degenerative diseases later in life.
Our obsessive 21st century approach to cleanliness is believed to explain the reason that allergies underpin the majority of childhood illnesses.
We are changing the environment we live in too dramatically for our youngsters’ systems to cope.
It’s been observed that many immigrant children suffer because they haven’t previously been exposed to our New Zealand dust mites.
So to help keep your youngster healthy:
• Leave the hand sanitiser for hospital visits or post-toilet visits when out and about;
• Forget cleaning door handles except when they’re sticky or there’s a stomach bug in the family;
• If you must use wipes on the kitchen bench or in the bathroom, only do so for the weekly clean;
• Love those soft toys for their immune-building effect;
• Leave the human and environmentally unfriendly anti-bacterial soaps and cleaning chemicals on the supermarket shelf in favour of white vinegar, baking soda, lemon juice and salt;
• Get a pet;
• Put in a sandpit;
• And view the mud pie as self-inoculation.
