As I am sure most parents know, and even most non-parents know at this point, we live in a toxic world; one filled with chemicals and more chemicals that can and are detrimental to everyone's health. Over the past thirty years, there have been an estimated 2000 new chemicals that have been introduced into our environment, some of whose effects are known and documented, some that aren't. If you really want to be frightened, just consider that on the low end, about 80,000 chemicals go into the American industry, from manufacturing to the finished product. Frightened enough yet? Now lets through into the mix that more and more of these chemicals are being found to be toxic to the human body on some level, and even more toxic to pregnant women, their unborn children, and babies and toddlers that are developing. So where does this leave us now? Do we go through our houses searching out every product that may contain a chemical, attempting to eradicate toxins from our life, or do we simply sit by and say it is what it is and continue living the way we did? Well, there are extremes that one can go to on either end obviously, and there are some parents out there who will research every single product to check for baby safeness or simply human safeness. (Check out this article to see where some of these facts came from and to read a little more on paranoid parents.) Trust me, I am not saying that being cautious is a bad thing, especially when it comes to young children, but I feel that at times some people go a little overboard.
So where do my wife and I figure into this mix? While not completely swaying towards the paranoid, we do tend to watch what we buy and try to ensure that any product we do bring into the home is as natural as possible. Is everything we buy toxin free? Not by a long shot, but to try and figure out what we can buy that is toxin free and eradicate everything from our household that could possibly contain a toxin would be too time consuming and cost prohibitive. Most people know (or at least they will now) that a good portion of all natural products or those that contain the fewest amount of toxic chemicals are much more expensive than those containing them. Quite frankly, if we were to try and buy every product made from non-toxic chemicals, than we would probably go flat broke. To us, it just isn't possible to do that. So in light of that, we are not going to drive ourselves absolutely bonkers trying to research every product in our house to see what it contains. To be fair, we have, over the course of the past few years, slowly made the transition to keeping less toxic products in our home, both for our own safety and the safety of our son. We do feel it is important to expose him and us to as few toxins as possible, but at the same time, we know that it is near impossible to keep him away from everything unless we put him in a plastic bubble and let him live there till he is a teenager. Toxins, unfortunately, are in everything around us from the water, to the air, to the products we use every day. The best thing I think we could do, and are doing, is to minimize as much as possible the products in our house that are dangerous, or at least keep the more dangerous ones away from our son. Do we still use bleach in our white laundry? Yes, but that is pretty much all we use it for. Unfortunately, it does the best job at getting stains out of whites and because of that, will continue to use it on our clothes (never our son's at this point as everything goes into his mouth).
We already use a natural deodorant (because the ones containing aluminum can lead to Alzheimer's). The majority of our cleaning products our phosphate and bleach free (except for the straight bleach used in our whites). We don't have any new rugs in the house, the paint we use now is low or no V.O.C. However, despite all our efforts to keep toxins away from our son, he will inevitably be exposed to some and we can only hope that they don't do too much damage. The world is a toxic place these days and it doesn't look like it will get any better any time soon (although there is a trend for some products to be less toxic). We could get paranoid about everything our son comes into contact with, but what good would it really do? It might help keep the majority of toxins away from him, but besides that, it would probably add a good amount of stress onto my wife and I in our attempt to catalog, research, and eradicate every single possible toxin. So in light of that, we will stick to our current course, slowly but surely going more natural. We are doing pretty good right now, but as always, there is constantly more we could do. To jump right in would be suicide however. So despite how some parents might go crazy trying to protect their children (which I applaud and would never speak against), we will simply stay the course, do our best, and try not to drive ourselves crazy. We can only protect our son so much. What will happen when he goes to school? Surely he will run into some toxins there. What will happen when he ends up going over a friends house later on? Are we going to go in and check their house for toxins? No, so we will simply protect him as we can without being over protective. Simple as that, no paranoia, no craziness, just living.
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