In spite if all the gooey, gross and germy stuff my kids get into (and they DO get into some pretty yucko situations), I’ve always had this underlying suspicion of hand sanitizer being one chemical concoction that surely didn’t needed to be added to the pot.

Plain old soap and water works just fine for me thank-you.

And not just because there’s an argument to be made for ‘superbugs’ being encouraged by antibacterial stuff in general (a rant for another day) — there was something more to it.

Largely, I was able to avoid thinking about it though until this year when our middle child started kindergarten. Now it’s a staple in her day.

All fine and well for the rest of the class; I’m all for other people making decisions for their own children.

That was until she started getting ‘peer pressure’ from some of the other children in her class to ‘conform’ and use it after using the bathroom — mind you, I can about guarantee she’d already washed her hands — she always does — she even nags me when I skimp on washing a piece of fruit !

So how’d I figure out that she was getting taunted and badgered about using hand cleaner?

Well, Morgan (our dear daughter) is a thumb sucker. And when she got into the car one afternoon, she started complaining about how awful her thumb tasted.

Hard to say how much she’d actually ingested!

I proceed to lecture her about all the bad chemicals in the stuff (nothing new to her ears, of course) and ask her why she’d done it. The upshot was that a well meaning little girl was insistent that it was absolutely required or she would ‘tell’.

SO many lessons — WHERE to begin??

Well, I reinforced that when it comes to things like how one wants to clean their hands, it’s a personal choice and that different families have different ideas about ‘how’ things should be done. And that she should feel free to stand her ground and let the teacher know I said so if it came to that.

LOL — such drama over simplest of things!

Turns out — my gut was probably right about the stuff.

Snopes has an article about children ingesting hand sanitizer and alcohol poisoning — just three squirts!!

I guess simpler (and safer) doesn’t always mean more convenient

Andrea