Why Your Clean Home is Damaging Your Immune System (and what to do about it)

You’re Super Mom (or Super Dad), cleaning every surface in your house on a daily basis and ensuring that your kids never come into contact with any unnecessary pathogens. Little do you know that what you’re doing isn’t actually helping your kids. Being too clean can have a detrimental effect on your children’s health.

How the Immune System Works

The immune system is a lot like a muscle in several different ways. If it isn’t used, it can never get stronger. That is to say, if you protect your kids from every germ, virus, and bacteria that comes their way, their bodies won’t know what to do when a real invader comes along.

The typical healthy child must be exposed to dirt and bacteria on a regular basis. As the immune system successfully fends off or recovers from different illnesses, it will become stronger and stronger. If it never has these chances, it will be completely defenseless against serious or life-threatening illnesses that come along.

What Cleaning Too Much Does to the Body

All you have to do is look at the current generation of children and young adults to see what over sanitization does to the human body. Over the last several decades, illnesses like multiple sclerosis, asthma, inflammatory bowel disease, and type I diabetes have become more common than ever before.

This is true of all environments in which kids play, including home and school. While most schools practically bathe children in antibacterial soap and hand sanitizer, some schools are responding to this discovery by letting kids get more playtime in. By getting their hands dirty, educators theorize, kids can become healthier and smarter at the same time.

Antibacterial soaps may be the biggest offender of this phenomenon. Antibacterial soaps kill bacteria before they evolve, but they tend to leave some bacteria behind. The remaining bacteria evolve to the point that antibiotics and antibacterial soap are rendered ineffective. This has created a range of superbugs that doctors have no way of eradicating.

Finding a Balance

Of course, you can’t let your kids play in sewage and run rampant through quarantined wards of the hospital. Overexposure to illness and pathogens is even more dangerous than over sanitization. How do you find a balance?

It’s simple—you just have to let your kids be kids. Let them play outside for hours on end like you did when you were young. Have them wash their hands periodically, but don’t be all over them with antibacterial soap. Let them get into the dirt and play with unsanitized toys without obsessing over it.

All of life is a balance, and that’s especially true in parenting. You have to build your children’s immune systems without overtaxing them, and you have to protect them from illness without putting them in a bubble.

Knowing this information should make you breathe a little bit easier. Next time your little ones are playing outside, you can relax with a magazine instead of washing everything they touch!