An important part of keeping out homes clean is to protect our families from germs. We teach our toddlers to wash their hands after going to the bathroom and before eating. We put our babies in shopping carts but first we wipe the bar with an antibacterial wipe. When we are out and have no way to wash our child’s hands we break out the antibacterial hand wash or wipes.
Are we suffering from antibacterial overload? Everything has antibacterial properties now, dish washing liquid, hand soap, body wash. Is all this antibacterial stuff actually harmful to us?
When I was a child, soap and water were all we had and it seems to me that we caught fewer things than kids do now. As a child I never had strep throat or the flu or really anything that kept me home from school, my siblings were the same. At that time we got the normal stuff that kept us out of school,like chicken pox or things that were just a huge irritation like poison ivy.
We were dirty from sun up to sun down, the bathtub rings we left behind meant my mother scrubbed the tub every night after baths.
Is our obsession with germs making our homes safer for our children or allowing bacterial to become stronger and more resistant. If you do a Google search there are plenty of opinions backing up both beliefs.
I, for one, don’t like all the antibacterial stuff and won’t buy it. Mostly because I don’t want to put all of that stuff on my skin, but also because, as my grandmother said, a kid needs a little dirt to be healthy.
I’ll keep cleaning my house but you won’t find antibacterial hand soap at my sinks, and personally, I think I’m a little healthier for it.