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We clean our home to keep our family safe. But the very products we're using to create a cleaner home could be the ones putting our children's health at risk.
At My Health Food Shop, founded by nutritionist and dietitian Zabin two decades ago, we've always believed that true wellness starts at home. And that means looking honestly at what's in our cleaning cupboards, not just what's on our dinner plates.
Let's dig into the five reasons conventional household cleaning products are bad for kids, and what you can do about it today.
This one might seem obvious once you think about it, but most of us don't. Babies crawl, sit, roll, and play directly on the floor. Even older kids spend a remarkable amount of time on the ground building with blocks, doing puzzles, lying on the carpet watching TV.
From a chemistry standpoint, many chemical compounds released by conventional cleaning products are heavier than air and settle close to the floor. Cleaning residues from floor cleaners, disinfectant sprays, and surface wipes linger on the very surfaces your child is pressed against, crawling over, and touching before putting their hands in their mouths.
Research published in the ATSDR's Environmental Medicine series confirms that toxic gases from household cleaners can layer close to the floor, placing crawling infants and toddlers in the highest concentration zones.
Add to this that children breathe approximately 50% more air per kilogram of body weight than adults, with newborns taking up to 45 breaths per minute compared to 12–14 for adults, and you start to see why the same cleaning products that seem harmless to you can hit your little ones with a far higher dose of chemical exposure.
Switch your floor cleaners and surface sprays to plant-based, fragrance-free formulas that leave no harmful residue. Our Kin Kin Naturals and Abode ranges are specifically effective, concentrated, and safe enough to use where your kids spend most of their time.
Read Also: Eco-Friendly Cleaning Hacks For Australian Families
Most parents are vigilant about what their children eat. But the air inside your home gets far less attention, and yet your kids are breathing it every hour of every day.
A landmark peer-reviewed study by Environmental Working Group scientists analysed 30 common cleaning products and found they collectively released 530 unique volatile organic compounds (VOCs), of which 193 were classified as hazardous, with the potential to cause respiratory damage, increased cancer risk, and developmental impacts.
Conventional products, on average, contained 22 hazardous VOCs per product. On the other hand, green fragrance-free alternatives contained just 4. That's a massive difference in your family's daily exposure.
"Residential exposure to cleaning products has been shown to have an adverse effect on respiratory health, particularly on asthma onset, and on the occurrence of asthma-like symptoms among children." — Published research, Environmental International Journal, 2024
The chemicals most commonly responsible include:
The science is increasingly clear. A sparkling clean home achieved with conventional products is not the same as a healthy home. In fact, the more you clean with these products in a sealed, air-conditioned house, the higher the concentration of these chemicals builds up indoors.
This is the reason that concerns health professionals the most, and yet it's the one most parents know least about. Conventional cleaning products, particularly those with synthetic fragrances, are often loaded with endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs), substances that interfere with the body's hormonal systems.
The most common include:
The reason children are particularly at risk here is that their hormonal systems are still developing. Even low-level, repeated exposures to EDCs during critical windows of development can have lasting effects that may not show up until years later.
Children's developing organ systems make them uniquely susceptible to endocrine-disrupting chemicals. Exposures during early development can affect the body's hormonal systems in ways that persist into adulthood. — Mount Sinai Institute for Exposomic Research
One of the most frustrating aspects of this issue is labelling. When a product says "fragrance" on the label, that word can legally represent a cocktail of dozens of undisclosed synthetic chemicals — many of which are EDCs. Australian consumers deserve better transparency than this.
Read Also: Why You Should Not Use Conventional Household Cleaning Products
Choose laundry detergents and household cleaners that are genuinely fragrance-free or scented only with certified essential oils. Our Kin Kin Naturals Laundry Liquid is scented with natural lavender and ylang ylang essential oils without any synthetic fragrance or hidden hormone disruptors.
Infants and young children have thinner, more permeable skin than adults, which means potentially harmful substances can be absorbed more readily through skin contact.
This becomes particularly relevant when you consider the surfaces your child interacts with every day. All of these surfaces can carry trace residues of whatever cleaning products were used on them.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR), children have greater skin perfusion and hydration than adults, rendering them more susceptible to the systemic effects of topical exposures, including those from phenolic disinfectants commonly found in conventional bathroom cleaners.
Newborns and infants have thinner, more permeable skin. This means their skin can absorb harmful substances, such as pesticides and cleaning supplies, faster than adults.
Laundry products deserve special mention here. We wash our children's clothes, sheets, pyjamas, and soft toys in laundry detergent — and those items sit against sensitive skin for hours at a time. Children with eczema, rashes, or sensitivities are often reacting to the residues left behind by conventional detergents, not to the fabrics themselves.
Switch to a sensitive-formula, plant-based laundry detergent free from optical brighteners, synthetic fragrances, and harsh surfactants. The Abode Laundry Powder in Lavender & Mint and Kin Kin Naturals Oxygen Laundry Soaker are both excellent options that clean thoroughly without leaving the residues that trigger skin reactions in kids.
Read Also: The Health Benefits of Eco-Friendly Cleaning Products
Young children are developmentally wired to explore the world with their mouths. From infancy through to the toddler years, putting objects and hands in the mouth is completely normal behaviour. It's how they learn.
The problem is that this perfectly normal behaviour becomes a direct exposure route for any toxic residues in your home environment. A toddler crawls across a freshly mopped floor, touches the surface, and puts their hand in their mouth.
This is not a hypothetical risk. The American Association of Poison Control Centers reports tens of thousands of cases annually involving children's unintentional exposure to household cleaning chemicals — and those are just the cases serious enough to be reported.
Because infants and children are smaller than adolescents and adults, they receive a proportionally larger dose per unit size of chemicals they are exposed to in their environment. — PMC, National Institutes of Health
Beyond accidental ingestion, hand-to-mouth behaviour means children are routinely ingesting microscopic amounts of whatever is on the surfaces they touch. With conventional products, that includes surfactants, preservatives, synthetic fragrances, and disinfecting chemicals — day in, day out, in tiny but cumulative amounts.
Making the switch doesn't have to be overwhelming or expensive. In fact, many plant-based eco cleaning products are concentrated formulas that work out cheaper per wash than their conventional counterparts.
At My Health Food Shop, we've carefully curated our eco home cleaning range with these concerns in mind. Every product we stock has been assessed against our values of being organic, natural, sustainable, and ethical, because we believe those values matter just as much in your cleaning cupboard as they do in your pantry.
Explore our full range of eco home cleaning products, including plant-based laundry detergents, kitchen and bathroom cleaners, natural essential oils, and more.
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