I’m hearing lot of moms say that it’s ok to let children play in dirt, attend daycare with sick kids, not sanitize the living spaces too much, put dirty stuff in their mouths because they can only build their immune strength by getting sick first(?!).
I have read the hygiene hypothesis paper and many research papers that have disputed that paper aswell so I’m just curious to learn the science behind the idea ‘let them get sick first’.
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Please note that I’m not condoning or disapproving of this practice, just explaining the thought behind it.
There are a number of common illnessess/things we can get an immunity to. If you expose a child to them slowly, over time, they are likely to gain immunity to a number of them before they go to school, at which point they’re likely to be exposed to almost all of them in rapid succession, so the thought is that, if you have some immunity, you’ll not get as sick as often once you’re in school. You “spread out” the ~~inievitable~~ *inevitable* illness.
It makes sense.
On the other hand, we were pretty much constantly sick when our kids were young because there’s always another variant of something going around, so your immunity isn’t always all that helpful.
So it also makes sense to avoid them getting sick whenever you can.
I don’t know what the best course of action is. I just am trying to present the thinking behind this.
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