Creating great hygiene habits for kids
At GRASP we're aiming to help teach kids independent skin-health and hygiene habits that stick with them for life.
As a parent, having kids stretches you! It takes the things you find hard and tests them to the extreme.
If you’re a neat freak, you will find the mess is particularly hard to deal with. If you love your sleep, the nights (and the days!) will seem impossible to get through.
Hate being sick? The fear or your kids being ill can haunt you.
Love to be in control…? Well then, I have bad news: you’ll find everything hard!
Passing on good hygiene habits
One thing that’s particularly tricky is trying to teach your kid skills that you yourself find difficult. Good hygiene - looking after our skin, hair and teeth - is something we often take for granted as grown ups. They’re often things that we don’t even think about. We take it for granted that we can go out into the world, embrace the environment we live in and our skin will defend us from bad stuff. We learn to wash our hands, bodies, hair and face and we probably all think we do a decent job.
But COVID-19 showed us that maybe that wasn’t true. It was pretty humbling having grown adults learn that actually, they didn’t really know how to wash their hands and had never been taught to do so properly. You might remember the NHS instructions for hand washing circulating in the early days of the first lockdown and even learning a thing or two!
As a parent of a toddler, it threw into stark relief what I probably already knew. How am I meant to teach my kids to look after their personal hygiene – their skin, their hair, their teeth, etc. - when I’m barely equipped to look after my own?
In other parts of kids’ daily routines – sleeping, eating, playing – brands have created products that help our kids build the skills they will need to thrive later in life. From carefully designed cutlery to sleep training clocks, and toys that develop fine motor skills, we know that there are intermediate steps our kids need to take to develop the best skills and routines to succeed in life. But bathing and changing routines seem to have remained largely unserved in this regard.
Good habits start young
Habits are sticky. Get it right or get it wrong, those habits will be with you for life because it’s so hard to change. Yet, when it comes to personal hygiene, as parents we often expect some magic transformation to happen where one day we’re doing everything for them, and the next they’ve worked it all out for themselves. It’s less about helping them learn and more about hoping they’ve picked up the right stuff from all we’ve done for them.
At GRASP we’re creating the products that will show kids how to look after their own personal hygiene. Our products are made to help parents feel confident teaching and for kids to feel confident learning. We believe that with a combination of better, simpler tools and natural skincare, we can help equip kids with great habits that will last a lifetime.
We want to create products that perform better for kids today, while also paving the way for kids to look after their own bodies as they grow up.
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