There’s No Such Thing as Bad Weather

by Linda Åkeson McGurk

  As if parents weren’t already freaking out enough, headlines like “Playing with Danger: Germy Playgrounds” and “Children’s Playgrounds Are Dirtier Than Toilets, Study Shows” help fan the fears. Whether the viruses and bacteria found on the play equipment in public parks are actually dangerous (most of them are not) or whether it’s possible to protect the children who play there from getting sick (it is, with regular hand washing), the damage of knowing that a baby swing or a seesaw can have as much as fifty-two thousand times more germs than a typical home toilet seat is already done. As the old adage goes, perception is reality. And that perception holds that all germs are bad and should be eliminated at any cost, preferably by a bucketful of bleach or, at the very least, by a liberal dose of hand sanitizer.

  In reality, our modern, sanitized lifestyle has wiped out a lot of beneficial microbes in our gut that help us stay healthy. Being exposed to certain microbes in the womb and early childhood can actually strengthen our immune systems and protect us from illnesses later on. When the immune system is not challenged enough, it might start looking for stuff to do, like overreacting to things that are not really dangerous, like pollen and peanuts. This is believed to cause allergies, asthma, eczema, childhood diabetes, and inflammation later in life.

  In academic lingo, this is called the hygiene hypothesis, and it’s been around since 1989. Many studies have supported this hypothesis, most famously a comparison of children in West and East Germany before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The researchers were surprised to find that the children in the poorer, dirtier, and less developed East were less likely to suffer from asthma and allergies than the children in the more affluent and sanitary West. More recently, studies have found that Amish children have remarkably low rates of asthma and allergies. The reason? Likely what European scientists call the “farm effect.” Breathing in the microbes found in manure from cattle and other farm animals every day is beneficial to the immune system and could explain why only 7.2 percent of the Amish children in one study had an increased risk for allergies, compared to 50 percent of the general population. The Amish kids also had more siblings among whom to pass around the germs, which means they build more immunity. And the earlier we are exposed, the better the protection.

  One group of microbes in particular has gotten researchers’ attention. Some research suggests that low- or nonpathogenic strains of mycobacteria can help regulate the immune system and protect against allergic hypersensitivity. One of them, Mycobacterium vaccae, seems to have the ability to trigger our serotonin production, effectively making us happier and more relaxed. M. vaccae occurs naturally in soil and water, and is inhaled or ingested when we come in contact with dirt. Our exposure to mycobacteria has decreased considerably due to sanitation and water treatment in Western urban areas, but by regularly playing outside or helping out with a backyard garden, children can still get in contact with it.

  A recent study on mice also revealed that M. vaccae can improve cognitive functions, like learning. When researchers Dorothy Matthews and Susan Jenks at the Sage Colleges in Troy, New York, fed the bacterium to one group of mice, they were able to navigate through a difficult maze twice as quickly as the control group while being half as stressed. After the mice were taken off the M. vaccae diet, the effect of the bacterium gradually tapered off for about three weeks, at which point it disappeared. The researchers speculated that the M. vaccae not only helped the mice feel less anxious but also made them concentrate better.

  “Gardeners inhale these bacteria while digging in the soil, but they also encounter M. vaccae in their vegetables or when soil enters a cut in their skin,” Matthews told Therapeutic Landscapes Network after the results from the study were published. “From our study we can say that it is definitely good to be outdoors—it’s good to have contact with these organisms. It is interesting to speculate that creating learning environments in schools that include time in the outdoors where M. vaccae is present may decrease anxiety and improve the ability to learn new tasks.”

  Integrative pediatric neurologist Maya Shetreat-Klein also makes a good case for letting our children acquaint themselves with microbes early in life in her book The Dirt Cure: Growing Healthy Kids with Food Straight from Soil. “It turns out that all the things that are messy and dirty in the world, the very things we thought we needed to control or even eliminate to stay alive, are actually the very elements necessary for robust health,” she writes. “Bacteria, viruses, parasites and fungi play a critical role in developing and maintaining a healthy gut and immune system. Playing outside, digging for worms, planting vegetables, and essentially coming into contact with plenty of dirt and livestock are actually good things. Not just good—essential.”

  While American preschools and schools use chlorine disinfecting wipes like they’re going out of fashion, and many moms consider keeping a travel-size bottle of hand sanitizer in their purse nothing short of a survival strategy for the early years, Swedish parents have a slightly more relaxed relationship with germs. Hand sanitizer is mostly found at hospitals, and bleach is rarely used in the household or at schools for cleaning purposes. In fact, it’s rarely used at all, since it’s considered so toxic to the environment that several of the big chain stores have stopped selling it.

  “I used bleach to unclog the bathtub drain once,” my friend from high school, Linda, who has a nine-year-old son, confesses. “That tells you something about how strong it is. I felt really guilty about it afterward.” Another friend says she’s never even had it in her home, although her husband reportedly used it once to bleach jeans sometime in the early ’90s. “Why would you want to use bleach for anything?” she asks me. “It’s harmful. If the kids’ toys are dirty I just use soap or run them in the washer. But, honestly, I rarely wash their toys.”

  Nor is it the norm for babies and children in Sweden to take a nightly bath. The official recommendation from the nurse-midwives who advise Swedish parents on an ongoing basis until their child starts school is to give young babies full baths just once a week. “For the parents the bath is often a special time with the baby, so some people want to do it every night. But babies who take baths several times a week risk getting dry skin,” says Lotta Bohlin, the nurse-midwife in Borås. “Some parents want to use a lot of shampoo and soap, too, but that’s not necessary, because babies don’t get dirty the same way we do. Instead we recommend using just a little bit of oil in the water. In general, I think we’re too clean.”

  Older children get baths or showers on an as-needed basis, ranging from every night in the summer if they’ve gotten dirty while playing outside to two or three times a week if they’re not visibly filthy. In the US, on the other hand, the virtue of cleanliness is so ingrained that newborn babies are sometimes bathed by nurses at the hospital within hours of being born, before they’ve even had a chance to latch onto their mother’s breast, even though research has shown that the waxy coating that covers the baby’s body in fact acts like a moisturizer and natural cleanser that helps ward off infection.

  Of course, nobody’s suggesting that we should go back to the days of bathing once a year, drinking filthy water, and dying from simple, treatable illnesses. Vaccinations, antibiotics, and the improvements in sanitation and personal hygiene in the industrialized world have been key to curbing outbreaks of infectious diseases and have saved a lot of lives. Unfortunately, beneficial microbes were the unintended casualty of this progress. How to bring them back in an age when most people don’t have a barn with farm animals conveniently located in their backyard is a question that vexes scientists. Our relationship with parasites, bacteria, and viruses is complicated to say the least, and researchers don’t necessarily know what type of dirt can help protect us against asthma and allergies. But if being too far removed from nature is the main reason for the epidemic, as so many scientists seem to believe, one easy way to support children’s health and strengthen their immune system could simply be to let them play outside as much as possible
and not panic if they sample a clump of dirt or lick an earthworm. The ick factor may be high, and for small children rocks and other small loose parts can be a choking hazard, but the risk of them getting sick from such things is extremely low.

  “I watch out for cigarette butts and choking hazards,” one mom tells me. “But chewing on sticks and pinecones never killed anybody; kids have done that since the beginning of time. That’s how they get to know the world around them. They usually discover pretty soon that sticks don’t taste that great.”

  Exposure to microbes is not the only way children can benefit from messy play in nature—it’s also the ultimate sensory experience. Walking barefoot across a log, sinking your hands into a pile of mud, listening to the birds singing, and feeling raindrops land on your forehead are all stimulating to children’s senses. This is important because good sensory integration—i.e., our ability to process and organize the information that we get through our senses—means that our body and brain are functioning at their optimal level.

  According to pediatric occupational therapist Angela Hanscom, the recent rise in sensory issues in children can at least partly be explained by the fact that many of them don’t have the opportunity to get in direct contact with nature. To many of the children that she has seen over the years, walking barefoot or making mud pies is not something that comes naturally. “There’s a lot of anxiety and fear among children [regarding] getting dirty because they haven’t had that practice and exposure,” she says. “Mud gives you tactile input. The extra bonus is that when you’re digging and carrying heavy buckets, you’re getting proprioceptive input in your joints and muscles and that overrides the feeling of light touch, which feels yucky to some children. With practice and repetition, they’re going to be able to tolerate getting muddy.”

  In a clinical setting, therapists often use sensory bins and sensory bottles to stimulate children’s sensory input, but according to Hanscom some sensory experiences can’t be replicated indoors. She says any outdoor play is beneficial, as it helps kids stay active, but natural areas have one big advantage. “Being in wild places is going to be more therapeutic. For one, there is no noise pollution. In nature, you can hear the birds sing and figure out where your body is in space. Also, it’s going to be more calming, even though you’re in an alert state. Calm but alert is actually the perfect state for sensory integration to happen.”

  Sometimes it’s adults’ own fears that keep children from having sensory experiences in nature. Hanscom says preschool teachers who bring classes to her TimberNook nature camps often order the children to keep their boots on out of fear that they will step on something and get hurt. And parents who do let their children kick their shoes off in public run the risk of getting shamed. Going barefoot, like so many other things that used to be a common part of childhood in the US, has now become controversial.

  “We’re a barefoot family and we get a lot of negative comments,” says Lee, a reader of my blog who lives in New Hampshire. “People have always made comments about it, especially when I didn’t put shoes on my son when he was a toddler. That apparently made me a bad mother.” Now fifteen, her son still gets comments about walking barefoot. “Last summer he was told by a random stranger that he was going to get parasites from going barefoot, that worms were going to burrow through his feet,” Lee says.

  Sue, a friend in Indiana whose three-year-old son was stung by a bee while playing barefoot in the grass at his babysitter’s house, was lectured by a nurse practitioner after she sought treatment for the swelling. “Keep his shoes on at all times outside and don’t let him walk through clover” were the nurse’s terse instructions. In other words: Have fun playing in the driveway the rest of the summer.

  Many Americans have had these strict hygiene standards drilled into them from an early age, and breaking out of the mold can be difficult. When Ania, the American mom in Copenhagen, enrolled her daughter in a Danish forest school, she didn’t just have to battle the prejudices of some of her US friends and acquaintances. She also had some of her own.

  “If you had asked me two years ago what I was looking for in a school, cleanliness would have ranked pretty high on the list. To me, cleanliness was a pretty good sign of how much a school and its teachers look out for its students and how much they teach children to be mindful of their person and the environment around them,” she says.

  But, much to her own surprise, her daughter’s experience changed her perspective entirely. Even though her car is now regularly caked with dirt and sand, her hallway littered with little twigs and crumpled leaves, and her washing machine running constantly, Ania embraces it and has become a fierce advocate for forest schooling and messy outdoor play.

  “I learned that the kind of dirty that you get in forest school isn’t the kind of dirty that really bothers me,” she says. “This is the kind of dirty that you earn when you’re out exploring and learning and challenging yourself. That’s different from the kind of dirty caused by neglect or apathy or not knowing better. And it’s a kind of dirty I’m willing to encourage. As an adult, you must have the judgment to know which one of the two kinds of dirty you’re seeing on your child, and ultimately the children will learn to tell the difference too.”

  THE DISH ON DIRT

  In a society where nothing is considered really clean unless it’s been doused with chlorine, and hand sanitizer is hailed as the greatest thing since sliced bread, researchers now believe that keeping our kids’ environment sterile may not be so good after all. These ideas can help bring back some beneficial microbes into your child’s life:

  • Let your kids play outside and get dirty as much as possible. Most germs in our environment are completely harmless, and some are even beneficial to our health and well-being.

  • Don’t pressure your doctor for antibiotics at the first sign of a cold. Chances are the infection is viral and won’t be helped by antibiotics anyway. Overuse of antibiotics leads to drug-resistant bacteria, which is a major public health threat, as it makes it harder to prevent and treat a wide range of infections.

  • Let your child spend time with dogs and farm animals early on in life. As gross as it may sound, being around the microbes found in animal poop is believed to help protect against allergies later in life.

  • Wash hands to avoid infections, but ditch the antibacterial hand soap and nonalcoholic hand sanitizer. They don’t do anything that regular soap and water can’t take care of, and most of them contain triclosan, a harmful hormone disruptor that is believed to create bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics.

  • Stop that bleach-infused house-cleaning routine. There’s no need to use the nuclear option of cleaning supplies when old-fashioned soap and water does the same job without harming the environment and killing beneficial bacteria. Plus, contrary to popular belief, a study involving children in Spain, Finland, and the Netherlands showed that exposure to household bleach may actually increase the risk of infections like influenza and tonsillitis.

  • Support your child’s gut health by feeding her natural probiotics like kefir, yogurt, and fermented vegetables. The more diverse our gut flora is, the better able it is to support important bodily functions, like the immune system and digestion.

  Dress for the Weather

  * * *

  Along with a more relaxed attitude toward dirt, Scandinavians are known for their insistence that children “dress for the weather.” It was the logical extension of “There is no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothes,” and if I heard it once, I heard it a million times growing up. In fact, the clothes are the means that make it possible to play outside every day, all year-round, in the Scandinavian climate. Proper outdoor gear is mandatory both at preschool and at school, and the kids usually bring them to their playdates, indicating that there’s an expectation of outdoor play, even when the weather is cold or wet. When I ask the mother of one of Nora’s friends to bring her rain gear to a playdate on a particularly dreary day, she responds, “Of
course!” without hesitation. When I return her wet and muddy child after an hour-long session at the playground in the rain, she is equally enthusiastic. “It’s so nice for them to get out for a little bit, even if it’s raining!”

  According to parents here, no weather conditions are so bad and no mud puddle so big that they can’t be conquered with some good coveralls, waterproof mittens, and a pair of fleece-lined muck boots. The idea that it is good for children to play outside in all types of weather—assuming that they have proper gear—is pretty unique to the Nordic countries, and it applies to adults too. Ask a Scandinavian, “Why would you want your child to go outside when it rains?” and she’ll likely respond, “Why not?”

  “What’s so special about Sweden is that we have a long-standing agreement that it’s good for children to be outside, regardless of the weather, so that’s not something teachers need to discuss with the parents,” says Eva Kätting, director of studies for the master’s program in outdoor environmental education and outdoor life at Linköping University. This is often not the case in other countries and cultures. “When I’ve worked with Turkish teachers, for example, they tell me that the parents become furious if they take the children outside in the rain. They’d rather keep them home than allow it.”

  To some extent, the Scandinavian attitude is probably a reflection of the belief that being able to cope with different types of weather will make children more resilient.