"Hygeine" vs. Health, or Why I don't bathe my kids every day

I have, until recently, been reluctant to mention my practices regarding my kids and bathing. I think peer pressure has a lot to do with it. I am now far more confident in my ability to make correct choices for my family in spite of what society deems appropriate. This doesn't mean I am never wrong, or that I am not still learning, but just that I trust my choices far more than I used to.
Here's the deal. I do not bathe my kids daily. Or even every other day. Throughout the winter, my little kids bathe once a week, every Saturday night. (Whether they need it or not. Old joke. Ha ha.) I know that in today's cleanliness obsessed world, this is tantamount to saying I don't love my children. But I do, and it is because I love them that I make the choices I make. Let me explain. When Aubrey and JR and even Liz were small, I bathed them more often. Still not every day, but at least every other day. I found myself constantly slathering them with lotion to keep their little legs and arms from developing what we called "alligator skin," that dry and scaly condition that itches so much. Finally I said to myself, "Why am I washing off the bodies natural moisturizers in order to replace them with man-made moisturizers? Don't I trust nature to make a better moisturizer than Johnson & Johnson?" And so I decided to try it. I quit bathing them so often. And their skin improved. A lot. I learned an important lesson. If the body (and by extension, the Lord) has a system in place to do a particular thing (like moisturize), then I will allow it to work before I try to replace it with man-made solutions.
Even though I was happy with the results of bathing my kids once a week, I was embarrassed about it. Society seems to demand we bathe our kids nightly. Any article on bedtime rituals includes the evening bath. Mothers extol the lovely smell of the freshly washed child (Which I agree it true. It's a lovely smell, but what we smell is fragrance, not child.) The advertising machine pushes every kind of baby wash, baby shampoo, and baby lotion with photos of the warm and intimate act of bathing the child. Barely veiled warnings of the danger of germs and bacteria are everywhere. Lysol everything, they tell us. Dirt is the enemy!! There are some practical considerations as well. Sheets stay cleaner much longer when the body between them is clean every night, as do pajamas. So, in the face of the implied criticism of being unwashed, I kept my silence.
Then I started looking harder at other natural ways of living, including diet. I found that most Americans are deficient in Vitamin D. (The article linked at the bottom of this post greatly influenced me.) And I discovered that the bodies natural production of vitamin D hinges on exposing skin to sunlight to create the vitamin on the skin's surface and then allowing the skin to absorb the vitamin D back through the skin!! This can't happen in just the few hours between sun exposure and the evening bath. It takes longer. My belief was reinforced. It is better for my kid health to bathe them less frequently, even once a week. And as the years have passed, I have become more confident in the rightness of my choices for my family. There are of course exceptions. My oldest is on the verge of teenhood, and she runs a mile in PE almost everyday. She needs to shower more often, like I do. In the summer, they get sweaty (and stinky) much faster than in the winter, and they are dirtier, too, from working/playing outside most of the day. Also they swim often, which exposes them to chlorine and many other icky things. In the summer, the vitamin D thing is far less important, because I figure all the sun exposure probably keep their levels pretty high. We bathe more often in the summer, although still not every day.
I am pretty happy with the levels of illness we have in our home. My kids go years without seeing the doctor (except for the occasional well-child or immunization visit.) We miss very little school. I believe this is partly a result of allowing their vitamin D levels to be optimized by not bathing every day. (I also use sunscreen sparingly.) I don't have to keep them lotioned up all the time. And quite frankly, I'd rather have the time in the evenings to read to them, and play with them, and get their homework done, etc., instead of having to bathe them all.

http://mercola.fileburst.com/PDF/SunlightSpecial.pdf


[I have even extended this practice of allowing nature to work first to healing itself. A study I read concluded that children with ear infections (acute, not chronic) who were left unmedicated recovered in the same amount of time as those who were medicated. Wow! And you don't have to mess up their little systems with antibiotics (which are useful at the appropriate times, but also quite harmful to the digestive system, etc.) I quit taking my kids in to the doctor every time they had an ear infection, and we have never looked back. I feel I am contributing to the goal of keeping antibiotics from being overused, and I'm also keeping my kids far healthier that they would otherwise be. (Please do not read this to mean I eschew modern medicine, I don't.)]