A healthy home life is one of the biggest gifts you can give to your children as they grow up. It encourages them to be active and provides them with an appropriate space to explore and develop their potential.
One of the most important yet overlooked ways of ensuring a healthy environment is to keep the air in your home clean. Clean air prevents a wide range of diseases and promotes a good quality of life, especially for young children.
Five Household Air Problems and Solutions
In your household alone, there are aspects that you might overlook during your routine cleanups. Use this as a checklist to help you see what you can do to improve the air in your home.
1. Your Air Ducts
Pollutants love to reside in your vents. Dust, pollen, and dead skin cells inevitably build up there as you do your daily activities. These don’t just affect the smell of your home, but also the health of your family, especially your kids.
Dirty household air can aggravate existing illnesses such as asthma and trigger attacks. Allergies and skin conditions also worsen due to poor air quality.
Solution: Avoid unnecessary coughing, headaches, and rashes at home by hiring an air duct cleaning service. Professionals remove months’ and even years’ worth of dirt, which allows your air filters to function properly.
2. Your Disinfectants and Cleaning Supplies
Cleaning products contribute to urban air pollution as significantly as vehicle exhaust does. The chemicals found in your kitchen and bathroom cleaners waft off chemicals that form particulate matter, aggravating breathing problems and cause diseases.
Solution: Use green cleaning supplies. These are made of safe ingredients that are good for the environment and cleared for regular human use. You can usually verify if a cleaner is environmentally safe if it has a certification label from the United States Environmental Protection Agency.
3. Your Pets
As fun as they are to play with, pets are often one of the culprits in polluting your household air. Animals with long and short fur alike carry dust and dander that get swept into your vents. They can also have allergens that stick to furniture and fabrics.
Solution: If you live in a home where some residents have allergies, it will be best to let your pets stay in a pet house outdoors to minimize the spread of dust. On the other hand, if you allow them to stay indoors, keep them outside of bedrooms and vacuum regularly to avoid dust accumulation.
4. Your Shoes
Shoes bring with them harmful elements from the places you visit. These can be further distributed at home when you walk around in them and have your kids play on the floor.
Solution: Keep these outdoor pollutants away from your home by not walking around in your shoes when indoors. Have a disinfecting mat and leave them by the door. Use house slippers instead when inside your home.
Lay down a floor mat for your children whenever they are crawling or playing games on the floor. This will give you peace of mind while your kids are having fun on their hands and feet.
5. Your Carpet
Carpets make a home cozy, but much of the pollutants that find their way into your home can get caught in them. The materials used to make the carpet adhere to your floors can also be irritants that trigger allergies.
Solution: Avoid health issues by replacing a significant part of your home flooring with wood, if possible. If you still prefer to have the comfort of carpets in your living spaces, opt for fluffy rugs instead. Rugs are much easier to clean and maintain than installed carpets.
Why Your Kids Need Clean Air
The World Health Organization (WHO) reports that 93% of children under 15 breathe unhealthy amounts of polluted air every day. According to WHO, dirty air affects children in particular because they breathe more rapidly than adults. They are also closer to the ground, where pollution is more concentrated.
Toxic air also stunts the growth of children. According to the American Lung Association, children who have regular exposure to it are at risk for reduced lung growth. This impairs the function of the lungs and can cause respiratory illnesses in children.
These facts show that fighting air pollution is not simply about protecting the environment. By aggressively reducing the causes of air pollution in our homes and outdoors, we build a safer environment for our children.
