A family doctor’s low-stress way to keep back-to-school germs out of the house
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You can't immune-proof a child, and she won't pretend you can. Still, you can make the house they come home to a little less hospitable to whatever they carried in.
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Every fall it goes the same way. The kids head back to school, they come home buzzing about new friends, and a couple weeks later a cough works its way through the whole house in a slow, miserable relay. That relay is not in your head. Researchers estimate that around 30 to 40 percent of flu transmission happens inside the home, and children are usually the ones who carry it in and pass it on.
So I wanted a plan aimed at the house itself, and I brought it to Dr. Jen Caudle, a board-certified family physician and family-medicine professor at Rowan University. If her face looks familiar, you may have seen her health segments on the TODAY Show, CNN, and Fox News, or she’s popped up in your social media scroll, offering clear and decisive health advice. What she offered read more like a permission slip than a battle plan. You can’t immune-proof a child, and she won’t pretend you can. In fact, it’s normal for them to get up to six colds a year. Still, you can make the house they come home to a little less hospitable to whatever they carried in.
Where back-to-school germs enter your house
Most of the germs in your house arrive the same way your kids do, barrelling through the door all at once. “The transition periods are when the majority of germs enter your home,” Caudle says, and the floor by the door takes the first hit. A 2008 University of Arizona study found the average shoe sole carrying around 421,000 bacteria, with coliform on 96 percent of the shoes tested, and those shoes handed most of it right off onto clean floors. The first few steps inside are the dirtiest stretch of floor you own.
Caudle’s fix is obvious. Everybody takes their shoes off, every time. “It’s a simple barrier that actually makes a meaningful difference in what you bring into your living space, particularly in the areas where your kids play and eat,” she says, which matters more when you remember that the place your kids play and eat is, for most of us, just the floor. This is not a reason to spiral, though. Infectious disease experts will tell you there is no real record of shoe-sole germs making anyone sick, so treat the rule as cheap insurance rather than a new anxiety.
The germiest room in your house is the kitchen
If you have been pouring your energy into the bathroom, that’s great, but there’s another spot that warrants more scrutiny. The National Sanitation Foundation has repeatedly found the kitchen to be the germiest room in the house, ahead of the bathroom. Its testing turned up coliform bacteria on more than 75 percent of kitchen sponges, compared with roughly 9 percent of bathroom faucet handles, and the humble dish sponge came in as the single dirtiest item in most homes.
That lines up with where Caudle would have you spend your effort anyway. Start with wherever your kids actually eat, she says, because counters and tables collect whatever came home on their hands. Then the usual suspects, door handles and light switches, “because this is where one sick kid can contaminate a whole household.” The spots people forget are the lunchbox, the water bottle, the backpack, and the parade of toys that go everywhere and get cleaned approximately never. A quick pass with a Clorox Disinfecting Wipe covers those without becoming a whole event.
How to get kids to wash their hands
The one habit that reaches every room is handwashing, and lecturing a six-year-old about the twenty-second rule gets you nowhere. Caudle hands kids a finish line they care about instead. “Wash until all the soap bubbles disappear,” she suggests, or have them count to twenty. Then she makes it automatic. “Backpack goes down, hands get washed, then you can snack. No exception,” she says. Sanitizer covers the car and the pickup line, while soap and water does the real work when hands are visibly dirty.
The part to keep in mind
None of this is a test you pass or fail. “Kids getting sick usually isn’t a parenting failure. It’s often a part of life,” Caudle says, and between the new classrooms and the shared everything, some exposure is coming no matter what. So guard the doorway, give the kitchen more attention than the toilet, keep the handwashing boring enough that it sticks, and let the rest go. The coughing will come and it will go, and everyone will be back out the door and into the fray as planned.
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