A hygienic lifestyle encompasses both physical and emotional health. For children, good health and hygiene practices go hand-in-hand with effective learning, and equally, learning about healthy and hygienic lifestyles helps give children the independence and confidence to make well-informed decisions about their health, which have life-long implications.
Everyone remembers the smelly child in their class, but did you ever consider how that child must have felt? A child with poor personal hygiene may feel ostracised from school by the reactions of their peers, and often teaching staff are unsure of how to address the issue. For this child, the school environment can quickly become a very negative place, with their learning experiences becoming tainted by their social interactions.
‘They can become withdrawn and lose a great deal of confidence,’ says special educational needs teacher Sue Bishop. ‘This then affects their motivation and stimulation to learn.’
Lack of proper hygiene in children can also make them more susceptible to contracting illnesses such as stomach bugs. These can cause absences from school which affects their access to consistent learning. Research from the Hygiene Council, finds that this could, however, be prevented as ‘the simple act of hand washing reduces the risk of getting a stomach bug by as much as 47 per cent’.
Learning about hygiene helps children begin to understand and make sense of different bodily functions. Hygiene consolidates learning in curriculum areas such science and physical education, giving real and physical examples of life-processes such as breathing and sweating, and links between food prep and food poisoning.
Many schools approach the teaching of hygiene through Personal, Social and Health Education (PSHE), which aims to ‘help pupils lead confident, healthy and responsible lives both as individuals and members of society’. The hygiene strand of PSHE shows children how their personal choices can affect wider communities. Feeling part of a community is crucial to child’s burgeoning sense of respect for the welfare of others.
The ‘real choices’ that the QCA suggests children make in PSHE can have a lasting effect on their attitude to personal hygiene for years to come.
Learning in schools can only go so far, and anyway, parents are far better placed to lay the foundations of their child’s hygiene routine. Remember, a healthy, hygienic child, is a happy child.
