Keep Germs at Bay Around Your Kids
Posted: Monday, December 07, 2009
by Gabriella Gometra
Let's face it. Germs and kids are best buddies. Children are always putting their hands everywhere and anything they can put their hands on ends up in their mouths. It is an unfortunate truth that most germs are not spread through the air, but by the hand to the mouth or the eye. Here are a few ideas on keeping the germs away from kids, while trying to teach them good habits to last a lifetime.
After a bath or hand washing every child should have their own towel. If one child is getting sick and their nose runs a little on their towel, another child can pick up those germs easily. Every family member should have their own towel and towels should be washed frequently.
Also, teach children young not to share cups. Everyone should have their same cup to use all day. This prevents so much cup washing, but it is also helps to keep children straight on which cup is their own if certain cups in the cupboard are always their own. They can have a particular character on their own sippy cup or you can coordinate their cups by color. A magic marker has been known to be employed on cups from time to time to write family members names on them.
Avoid letting your children sit on dirty toilet seats. At home you can keep a nontoxic cleaner on the bathroom counter and wipe down the seat on top and underneath several times a day with a little toilet paper. Be certain your cleaner is nontoxic! They are out there, but not all cleaners will qualify. You do not want to protect your children from germs to turn around and be poisoned by a common household cleaner. In public rest rooms, assume that all toilet seats are germy. If there is no paper liner to use, help your child to avoid touching the toilet with their hands at all, and always follow up with scrupulous hand washing.
Do not let your children eat raw meat, fish or eggs. This is not a particularly safe practice for adults either, but at least a healthy adult has stronger body defenses for fighting the kinds of germs that can occur in these raw foods. It can be hard, but avoiding raw eggs means no licking the cake batter or eating the cookie dough before being baked. Also, do not hesitate in a restaurant to send your child's hamburger back if it has not been cooked thoroughly.
Teach your children proper hand washing. They need to lather up for at least the time it takes to sing their alphabet song. Supervise them so that they are washing their hands before and after eating, after using the potty, after playing outside, after school, after playing with friends and more. The parent should be washing hands also, especially after changing diapers.
Parents also need to fight germs on as many household surfaces as they can. Particular attention should be paid to doorknobs, toys, toilets, garbage can lids, and floors. It is a good practice to remove shoes indoors to reduce the bringing of germs indoors from outside.
Following these suggestions will help to keep your children from getting sick. It will establish some healthful habits for a lifetime. You can try to teach your children to keep their hands away from their mouths and faces also, but keeping the hands and the child's environment clean, as we have discussed, is another way to wage the war on germs.
Author Bio:
Gabriella Gometra, stay-at-home mother and writer, builds sites on a diverse number of family topics, such as http://childrenslearningtoys.org which is a great resource about children's learning toys.
This Article has been viewed 2,228 times. (Not updated in real-time.)
Top-level comments on this article: (2 total)Hi Gabriella."... but at least a healthy adult has stronger body defenses for fighting the kinds of germs that can occur in these raw foods." You've made some good points about good hygiene, but I would just like to say that the way a person develops a good immune system is by exposure to bacteria and viruses that provoke an immune system response. Keep them too clean and their little bodies will not adequately learn how to deal with germs.I'm not saying that you need to let them get seriously sick, but when I catch a mild virus and am a bit out of sorts for a week or so, I tell myself that I'm exercising my immune system. I'm also not saying I'm correct in this, but just think about it a bit.DianneI think kids "provoke" their immune systems all day long as I pointed out with my example of how things always seem to end up in kids' mouths. On the other hand I remember a tragic outbreak of e.coli contamination of hamburgers in a restaurant chain in the Northwest U.S. a few years ago. If only we could look at a one circumstance and say "this is good exercise for the immune system" and look at another and say "this is dangerous." I don't think it can be done.
I disagree with a lot you say here Gabriella, I don't believe child has to bathed every day. And I believe some germs can be healthy to a child. But that's only my opinion I'm not criticizing what you say here only giving my opinion.Kind of like I said above, it's too bad we can't actually see the germs and say here are good ones and here are the bad. Another reason I like to bathe my kids every day is because they always seem to be getting food in their hair and they always seem to have dirt under their nails, even with daily baths. Maybe other people's kids are cleaner, so I don't know what's wrong with mine.
We want your comments! If you can read this, you don't have javascript enabled, so you can't use this comment system. Please enable javascript.