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Bringing a new baby home to a house with pets can be nerve-wracking. One might be concerned with how the pets will react to the child. Even if a pet doesn’t seem jealous of the baby, will it know to be gentle enough around the infant? Will exposing a newborn to a house with pets, and the many allergens they release, cause the child to grow up with sensitivity to that animal?
Earlier this year I covered the former concerns in depth. Today I’m going to look at the latter: are children who grow up in a home with pets more or less likely to develop allergies to those animals?
If you walked up to me on the street and asked me that question, I would have guessed no. I’d figure it’s similar to how children need exposure to certain germs in order to build immunities to them; an ultra-sanitized house is actually worse for a child than one in which the parents aren’t afraid to let their kids get a little messy.
However, many parents are concerned that having pets in a house with children, especially babies, will make kids more likely to have allergies. Anyone trying to get to the truth of the matter will discover that scientific findings on the topic are scattered.
MSNBC recently reported on the results of a new study suggesting that having pets in the home with an infant actually help the child build immunities to pet-related allergies. But reading further reveals that things are not that clear cut.
Preliminary results of the 18-years-long study indicate that a child’s first year of life is the critical year: children exposed to pets as infants are more likely to be desensitized to pet allergies than those who are not. Only that first year of life is relevant; after children turn a year old the relationship between childhood exposure to pets and later development of allergies is negligible.
However, the specific results of the study are puzzling. Having a cat in a home with both boys and girls in their first year of life halved the risk of the children developing an allergy to cats. Infant boys with exposure to dogs also had half the risk of being sensitized to dogs later on. However, infant girls in homes with dogs were more likely to become allergic to dogs.
This is the part of the study that baffled me. Why would gender not make a difference with regards to cat allergies, but do so for dog allergies? The main cause of the difference between male and female bodies is hormones, so what hormones react differently to canines than felines? I’m sure that other studies will pursue this as-yet-inexplicable difference, but until those results are published it’s a head-scratcher.
As with any scientific report, there are others that contradict or expand upon its findings. Other studies have suggested that early childhood exposure to dogs makes no difference for allergies, but does so with cats. Still others have posited that children born by Caesarian section are more likely to develop allergies, possibly because being born through the birth canal exposes children to more bacteria.
While none of these studies give parents a definitive answer as to whether or not pets in the home will affect children’s allergies, they should help expel fear. There is no proven link between pets in the home and allergy sensitivity, so if you’re an animal lover you needn’t worry about your pets impacting your child’s health.
Related Articles:
Finding and Eradicating Pet Odors
*(This image by D Sharon Pruitt is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License.)
