Your child’s first step into self-care is learning about personal hygiene and cleanliness. Being clean and hygienic, will help their general health and make them feel good about themselves, and boosts their self-esteem. The earliest you can teach the practice of personal hygiene, the better. Bringing about cleanliness in your child is not an uphill task as children mostly imitate the people they interact with, so you have to practice cleanliness expressively with your child.
So, if they see their parents or caregivers being attentive to personal and surrounding cleanliness, they also incline toward such practices from the onset of their infanthood. Once they are 2-3 years old, you can start to make them understand why they need to keep themselves and the surroundings clean. And that is where ROYBI Robot can be an aid in educating about habits that can induce cleanliness.
There are various types of cleanliness that you can practice with your child so that when they grow up to become adults, they don’t look at being clean as a stressful chore but a natural instinctive activity.
Body Hygiene-
Healthy body hygiene habits include taking care of the skin, hair, feet, and pubic region.
Bathing is an activity that gives an overall cleansing of the body. This crucial practice will ensure your skin health and keep your body free of dirt. Start developing bathing habits early in children, and while at it, express your delight about bathing evident. Maybe tell them engaging stories about being clean during their bath time so that they start looking forward to it and at the same time learn the importance of bathing. They need to get their basics right, the rest they will pick up themselves.
Hand Hygiene-
Hand hygiene does not come under bath hygiene but as a separate category, and that is self-explanatory to understand its importance. Especially as we are currently in a time where proper handwashing will prevent us from contracting viruses like Covid-19, it is of utmost priority to teach children the right way to wash hands. Activities like Holding, writing, moving, eating, and countless other activities require hands, so we need to ensure that the child’s hands are clean. Practice handwashing with them before and after having meals and using toilets. When children play with pets or play outside, handwashing is a necessity.
Oral Hygiene-
Our oral cavity is the gate to the food we eat, which is later entering the body. As our mouths are generally a storehouse of necessary bacteria, it is a favorable environment for unnecessary ones too. You can start by supervising your children when they brush their teeth by brushing with them. Teach them about the side-effects of not brushing teeth- like tooth decay. It would be best if you also inculcated habits of brushing teeth after every meal. Proper oral hygiene is a time taking process but worth it.
Surroundings hygiene-
After cleansing every inch of your body carefully, if you will spend your day in a messy and unclean surroundings, there is no point in cleaning yourself. You are only as clean as your surroundings are. Tidying belongings, putting waste in bins, and other tasks can help keep your environment clean and lower the chance of illness. While this seems like an easy process, the sooner you start instilling this hygienic behavior, the sooner your child will form a habit.