Please Sneeze on My Child

Strange title for a post, I know. With today's post I want to address the commonly perceived notion that children who are in day care are destined to suffer the fate of constantly being sick -- a notion that can leave parents who need or want to use daycare with an unnecessary feeling of guilt, when in actuality the truth of the matter isn't so bad after all.
Here are some important points to consider regarding day-care and contracted illness in childhood:
1. Young children with older siblings and those who attend day care are at increased risk for infections to which they haven't been previously exposed or developed immunity to. However, this phenomenon has been shown to protect against the development of allergic diseases later in life.
2. Exposure of young children to older children at home or to other children (such as at day care) protects against the development of asthma and frequent wheezing later in childhood. The New England Journal of Medicine specifically states, “The incidence of asthma among children who had two or more older siblings or who attended day care during the first six months of life was significantly lower than that among children who had one sibling or no siblings and who did not attend day care.”
3. One of the most important triggers for infant immune system maturation and development is exposure to microbes (i.e. bugs, like viruses and bacteria). Studies have shown that too much protection from these microbes in infants may actually increases the risk of eventual asthma and atopic (meaning allergic, such as asthma or allergic skin reactions) disease. Basically, we need to be exposed to things before our body can figure out how to defend itself against them.
4. A 2002 study in the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine found that Children in large day care centers appear to develop immunity to many of the viruses responsible for the common cold, a study reported in the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine has found. The study of 991 children found that those in day care had almost twice as many colds at age 2 as those cared for at home. But from ages 6 to 11, children who had attended large day care centers as toddlers had about one-third as many colds as those who had stayed home. So basically the kids may have more colds and minor illnesses under age 2, but in the long run they will be better off than those who did not attend daycare centers when they were younger.

One of the most common mistakes parents make is insisting on antibiotics when their child is suffering from a viral infection, often despite their own pediatrician's recommendations. This has been linked to serious complications and immune dysregulation in children in the future, and most definitely will cause more harm than good in the long run. More to come on this in future posts...

For now take a load off, ditch the useless guilt, and consider that day-care doesn't always deserve the bad, germy, rap that it gets. You may be building super-immune kids in the process, and its what you do with your children while they are with you that they'll remember in the long run -- not how many colds they had.