Parents, Stop Letting Your Kids Put Their Grimy Little Hands On Everything

Our kids are really gross at times. I fear there are occasions when we don’t notice this, due to the whole you’re-the-fruit-of-my-womb-I-love-you-more-than-anything thing.

This particular example is extreme, but a woman observed a four-year-old pull a roll out of a bin at the supermarket and lick it. Then she observed the kid’s mother take it from her and put it back in the bin. We can all agree that’s disgusting, right? Clearly. But there are a lot of other times our kids do really gross things that we all need to notice are really gross.

The most glaringly obvious ones for me happen at restaurants. This probably has something to do with the fact that I worked in them for so long – so I have a lot of examples of kids behaving badly and parents doing nothing about it. My biggest pet peeve is the salt thing. Did you know that kids love salt? Some love it so much, they lick the top of the salt shakers at the table. Do you know how many times I’ve seen this happen, and seen parents say something like, Oh my gosh! He just loooooves salt! wipe it off with their napkin and then act like it’s all good? No. No.

I’ve actually seen kids drink out of creamers at brunch. You all know that those don’t usually get dumped every time a table gets up, right? There is usually such a high turnover at a time like brunch that those things are just refilled and remain. Also, the sugar packets. They are played with, licked, thrown on the floor and then shoved back into their containers. Yuck.

Kids are filthy creatures. Their hands always need to be washed and they are constantly touching things they haven’t grasped are socially unacceptable to touch. That’s why we should really all do our best to teach them to keep their hands to themselves and make sure they fully grasp how disgusting it is to lick stuff other people need to touch.