Don't touch!
14I’m sitting at a little restaurant. A parent and their child are on the way to the bathroom. The kid wants to touch the wall and the parent scolds them to not touch the wall. The kid says they just wanted to feel what it was like. (Bead board wainscoting) The parent says, “It’s dirty.”
I don’t remember being scolded for touching stuff, but I’m sure it happened at some point. I also grew up playing in the dirt and the trees.
The thing that was weird to me is that they are going to the restroom, so they’re going to wash their hands anyway. I hope.
Are/were you a germaphobe with your kids?
It you don’t have kids, do you think you would be?
Any funny stories about kids touching stuff they shouldn’t be? I mean, there’s that one kid that stuck their tongue to the frozen pole in A Christmas Story.
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This kid stuck his lips to the ice built up on the freezer compartment on grandma’s old refrigerator.
Jerking back probably wasn’t the best way of dealing with being trapped.
Public places are filthy. Lots a dirty kids touching the same thing. I let my kid touch stuff in the right environment, but not dirty bathroom hall walls.
Also, sometimes you don’t want your kid’s greasy fingers ruining stuff, so you tell them it’s dirty.
@medz I was thinking this. The concept of “it’s dirty” is a lot easier to get across to a child than “you’re going to get little greasy handprints on it if you do that before we wash the French fry grease off your hands”, even if it is a little white lie.
When I played parent to a young child, I was almost always more concerned about the damage she would do to someone else’s things than the damage those things would do to her, but i found it easier to just stop at something akin to “don’t touch that, it’s yucky” rather than “have respect for other people’s things please”. It was really a lazy shortcut. If we were out in the backyard, at the park, or camping in the woods, hell yeah, let’s get our hands dirty and touch everything. But in someone else’s place or an establishment, let’s not go touching everything that’s not meant for kids to touch.
@djslack @medz I never thought of it that way. A different way to basically say, keep your hands to yourself.
It wasn’t the bathroom hallway, it was next to a table. They just happened to be going to the bathroom.
@RiotDemon
Exactly that. I know from personal experience though, kids get to an age when they are invincible to “yucky”. At that point a parent has to find something else, or hope the kids are behaved enough to just accept “don’t”.
@medz Yeah. I am constantly telling my kids to not touch walls because I don’t want them getting the walls dirty.
As a society, we have become very germophobic. Look at the market for hand sanitizers, and soaps that supposedly kill bacteria.
I know my mother boiled everything. I know I didn’t. There was a lot 40 years ago that said kids that came into contact with none of the normal environmental microbes did not develop a healthy immune system. But then again, MRSA, and things like C-diff were not in everyone’s vocabulary.
Somewhere there is a happy medium. As for texture on a wall, I’d find some way to allow the child’s curiosity. Maybe I’d make them go wash there hands first and then again after. I don’t feel there is anything wrong with trying to explain why. Curiosity is a good thing, stifling it is a bad thing.
/
@Cerridwyn I wonder if a lot of these diseases are more common because of the overuse of anti bacterial soaps, hand sanitizers, and the lack of getting into gross stuff.
Humans are interesting.
@RiotDemon
Damnit, i typed a significant reply and screwed it up
Not gonna blame the goat, gonna blame the zombie apocalypse. Are you ready?
https://www.cdc.gov/cpr/zombie/novel.htm
@RiotDemon I’ve read research that supports that and that kids that have animals in the house from when they are little are less likely to get asthma, etc. I mean we do have an immune system for a reason…
@RiotDemon Studies have leaned towards yes.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.vox.com/platform/amp/2014/6/25/5837892/is-being-too-clean-making-us-sick
@Cerridwyn @RiotDemon Naw, hand sanitizer is all good, and antibacterial soaps, etc suck, but didn’t cause MRSA or C-Diff— Indiscriminate use of antibiotics to treat colds and other viral infections- mostly due to consumer [read patient] demand are the proximal causes.
Big Pharma advertising and a consumer culture are underlying that proximal cause, at least in theory.
@Cerridwyn @RiotDemon I have their [the CDC Zombie program] Zombie Squad T-shirt- I thought that was a great campaign.
BTW- the US Armed Forces have developed Zombie Battle plans as well…
They then cleverly dissembled about it, calling it a training exercise:
http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/2014/images/05/16/dod.zombie.apocalypse.plan.pdf
@PhysAssist @RiotDemon
Thank you for the smile
I’d have probably been tossed out of the restaurant, since I tend not to have the sense that I should when speaking up might cause problems. I do have to say that people nowadays are insane on false notions of cleanliness, and what we ought to be careful of, and what just doesn’t matter.
When my daughter was little, and we lived in the middle of nowhere (not kidding, it was very isolated), everyone except me was retired, with the youngest there in the high sixties. She was playing outside, with a bucked and shovel, and I realized that every once in a while, she was tasting the dirt. My neighbor laughed when he saw it, and said “If they don’t eat a pound of dirt by the time they’re three, they’ll never be healthy.” Might be some truth in that, you know…
Seriously, there’s a strong difference between saying “You need to wash your hands because you just went to the bathroom, and I don’t care if you think they’re clean. It’s a good habit, and you need to just get used to it.” and saying don’t touch anything in public areas, because they’re all dirty and horrible and stuff.
I don’t get sick. Really. I had a childhood where I made mud pies, and tasted one, NOT delicious, and that was that. I made friends with random animals and people, and with rare exception, no one made any effort to check on them. My kitchen is, and always has been, spotless…well, except when I’m in the middle of things, which is often. :-}
Here, have some gingerbread.
@Shrdlu Did you cover it to keep it clean??
@chienfou It was covered to keep it from drying out. :-}
Two stomach viruses between 2013 and 2016 have convinced me that a) germs are very real; and b) no one else gives a damn about your physical health, so it’s up to you to take appropriate precautions to prevent illness.
It’s dirty, kids. It’s dirty.
@meshneiarin Hear hear. I don’t believe in the need for germ killers, but there’s there’s value in washing stuff off with soap—and staying home from work if you’re sick instead of spreading stuff. I spent a night and a day suffering from a confirmed case of Norovirus.
That was no fun. Yay for vomit-induced dehydration and a dystonic/akathisia reaction—think restless legs but over your entire body—to an antiemetic (anti-nausea) drug.
Supposedly, this is a reason that many now don’t have a good gut microbiome. Not enough decent bacteria introduced. ‘They’ say that Americans are too germ conscious nowadays whether they be good or bad germs. I think there’s a level of healthy cleanliness but it can go to extreme. I know we (my siblings and myself) were always into filth when we were kids. Yep… we got our baths but, we got pretty dirty first.
We made mud pies… my brother ate them. He ate charcoal too.
@Pavlov You delete some of your best comments.
@Barney damnit. I missed a good comment?
@Barney I forgot what I wrote. I assume it was akin to nihilism, on steroids.
@Pavlov I don’t remember what you said, but I’m pretty sure it was meaningful.
Peanut allergy is another example of avoidance possibly being the cause. Your immune system needs exposure to the environment to learn to recognize it.
Not a germophobe.
/image playing in dirt
/giphy germanphobe
and then re-germify them with the “fecal matter redistribution system”
this brings up my recurring point about the dirtiest place in a bathroom… I still speculate it’s the belt buckle.
@thismyusername I’d rather touch most toilet seats [unless visibly soiled], than the the faucets or door handles- I use paper towel to touch those, or love me some outward swinging BR doors in public BR’s.
Likewise we disinfect TV remotes at hotels and rentals before using them- and the bed spreads get taken off and put away in an unused corner til we move out. [We wear gloves for this- SWMBO is an RN too.
@thismyusername https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/air-dryers-vs-paper-towels/
@PhysAssist @thismyusername my favorite is the bathrooms that have automated soap, sinks, and dryers, but then the door is a pull handle. I’m not touching that. There’s been plenty of times I’ve been in a public restroom and someone leaves without washing their hands directly before I get out of the stall.
Also:
/youtube mythbusters hand dryer
Edit: meh. I can’t find the clip where they actually tested the dryers. They had a whole group of people using them. They tended to get impatient and wipe their hands on their pants.
@thismyusername I’m anxiously awaiting the return of cotton towel rolls.
Actually, looks like they’re already back…
http://www.darmanco.com/
@PhysAssist @RiotDemon @thismyusername Not sure right now where I saw it but within the past 3 or 4 days I saw an article on a health site about those blow dryers and how NOT good they are.
@PhysAssist @RiotDemon @thismyusername And it gets worse. A research article just came out that inside the soap dispensers has bacteria that gets mixed in the soap and and then survives to be picked up on your hands after you wash with the soap… Fortunately most of us seem to be surviving this dirty world. Even when I had chemo and white count below 1, I managed to get sick only from being exposed to someone else who was sick and not all this other random stuff that shows up on the list of what are the grossest bacteria filled things in your house, at work, etc. etc.
People who say kids should be allowed to get dirty must have forgotten what it is like to have a sick kid. It seems like any time we go to walmart, there is a 50/50 shot our kid will develop a runny nose the next day. Then, we get to deal with having a congested kid with sinus drainage for a whole week. Waking up multiple times during the night because the kid can’t breath and is choking on mucus… It’s not fun.
So, yeah, forgive us if we sanitize our hands and discourage the kid from touching things or putting her mouth on the shopping cart handle.
@medz no shade. Was just curious.