As a parent, you have to talk to kids about hygiene. It may be an uncomfortable conversation. Maybe your parents didn’t do such a great job of talking about important things like that with you. But you have to break those generational chains if you want to have your kids live the best life possible.
Three hygiene topics should come up as your children get older. First, you need to talk to them about their teeth. Good oral hygiene starts at home, but if you don’t emphasize this to your children from a very early age, they can develop habits that are hard to break. Second, you should talk about hygiene in bedrooms. There are places for dirty clothes. There are places that food particles should not reside. Having good bedroom hygiene is very important, especially as kids become teenagers.
Third, there is the hygiene of public spaces. Do your children know how often they should wash their hands in public? Do they understand how germs hop from one person to another on shopping carts or bathroom door knobs? You must tell them how to prevent sickness by comprehending public hygiene.
Teeth
Taking your kids to the dentist is a good start for oral hygiene practices. But it is not a complete way to teach them. You need to show them how to brush their teeth at home. You need to show them how to floss and use mouthwash.
Without these good habits instilled from an early age, your children can have terrible problems with teeth decay and gum disease even when they are still young. It is not hard to have nice teeth. But it does take a strong set of habits at home to create lifelong proper rituals.
Bedrooms
What about hygiene in kids bedrooms? The biggest thing is that kids need to know how to take dirty clothes out of the room and put them in a laundry hamper in the laundry room. They also need to know that they should not have food in their rooms if they don’t throw away crumbs or leftover scraps.
One of the worst things that can happen to a teenager’s room is for food to rot or for bugs to get into a pile of old sandwich parts. This is gross and unhygienic.
Public Spaces
Finally, your kids need to understand public hygiene. They should know to wash their hands in public restrooms. They should know that it’s a good idea to wipe off shopping cart handles and things like that.
People also sneeze and get their germs around in public. It’s essential to be aware of how sicknesses spread, so that not only do your kids not spread these diseases themselves, but it is much less likely that they will catch something while they are out in public.
