Cleanliness is next to--*hackhack* *coughcoughcough*

I like clean. Really I do. I like my house clean and my kitchen clean and my kid, my cat, my car... I just can't stand cleaners.

So I scrub the bathtub with baking soda and rinse it with hot, hot water and I use vinegar on stains and I basically try to get by without ever resorting to bleach or scrubbing bubbles (there's actually no bleach in my house and hasn't been for years).

"My God!" a good American parent would reply. "Don't you bleach your son's toys after he's had friends over? What if one of them had the sniffles? He could get a cold!?"

Um, yes. He could. And while I'm not advocating letting my child develop whooping cough or meningitis, a cold might be good for him.

There is a hypothesis called, aptly enough, "The Hygiene Hypothesis (HH)." (A good, though very medicalese, discussion of the theory is found in the first main section of this article) Basically, it posits that our immune systems create themselves bit by bit as we are exposed to and form antibodies to various bacteria, viruses--you know, "germs". Now, if your house is spit and polish, your baby's emerging immune system doesn't know quite what to make of it all. It knows it's supposed to create antibodies, but it's not sure to what it should create them because there's nothing like, say, rhinovirus around. You've done such a good job of protecting the child from "contagions" that his immune system says, in effect, "Well, I can't find any germs to make antibodies against. I know! How about this plant over here!?"

And thus, say the HH people, are created millions of children with asthma and allergies. Their immune systems are reacting to anything and everything because they have nothing concrete and dangerous to which to react.

Now, while I'm not entirely sure I quite buy all they have to say (a lot of the research done to prove the hypothesis is a little dicey and self-fulfilling for my taste), I do agree that children need to be exposed to a lot of things at a young age.

I believe in socializing a child and dealing with the blessed inevitability that he'll get rhinovirus or rotovirus or some other virus in his first couple of years. It will suck mightily to stay up with him while he labors through it, but it is a necessary thing.

I believe that children need dirt. No, I'm not saying you now have an excuse never to clean your house again, but I am saying that it's cool if, after a rainstorm, your son gets into a mud toss with his friends and ends up mucky from head to toe. Skin is there to keep the sodden gunk out of his peritoneal cavity. We're built to last, us humans.

Most of all, I believe that there is a much greater risk posed by many of our cleansers than by many of the germs for which we created them. Bleach is a poison. If you drink the cup of bleach you washed down the drain to "clean" it, you will die in all likelihood. If, however, you drink the pan of water you used to clean out the drain instead of the bleach, you're likely to be better hydrated and not much else (unless you didn't wait until the water cooled down before you drank it--shame on you).

I think it's not a bad idea to try to clean with only what you'd eat. Granted, I'm not interested in having a glass of vinegar with dinner, but I will use it on my salad, and therefore, I can use it on my floor.

A newborn really does need protection from pretty much everything, chemical or biological, but I'd rather not lock my three-year-old out of his room once a week because the rug cleaner I used in there was toxic. And really, unless he's dropping glasses of juice on that floor every five minutes, couldn't I shampoo the rug a little less often and vacuum it most of the time instead?

The old saying "God made dirt. Dirt don't hurt?" I'll buy that.