Longing for a little disorder

Eminently sensible advice from a five-year-old, though it was a little odd: we'd washed our hands at home just 30 minutes earlier. I raised an eyebrow, but she told me firmly, ''It's the rules,'' and took me to the washbasin.

And, indeed, it is the rules. That week, we parents received a note: ''It's now a departmental regulation that children wash their hands thoroughly with soap when they first arrive at the preschool and before they go home, as well as before and after they eat, handle food and [use the] toilet, to help prevent the spread of germs.'' Again, it sounds sensible, if perhaps a smidgen over the top.

But it nagged me enough to look into it. All Australian schools must now comply with new national quality standards. And element 4.1.2 of those standards means preschoolers must wash their hands at least eight times at school (more if they use the toilet or have a runny nose, which is fair enough). And by ''wash'', I mean rub the hands thoroughly with soap and hold them under a stream of water for 10-15 seconds.

Perhaps there's nothing wrong with the policy. But some epidemiologists are deeply concerned by this desire to eliminate germs from our society. There's growing support among medical researchers for the ''hygiene hypothesis''; in a nutshell, the belief that a lack of exposure to infections and parasites during childhood is causing diseases such as asthma, allergies and at least one form of leukaemia.

And while the hypothesis remains only a theory, an increasing number of studies back it. Amish and remote Aboriginal communities, whose residents are less likely to use antibacterial cleaning agents, report fewer immunological disorders. The rates of asthma are also much higher in wealthy nations than in the developing world. In March this year, the journal Science reported that mice kept in a germ-free environment were more likely to get asthma and inflammatory bowel disease, and had fewer infection-fighting ''killer'' cells in their blood. It wasn't the first research to link hygiene practices with weak immune systems.

I'd be more willing to shrug off the hand-washing obsession if it wasn't for the many other signs that we, as a society, can no longer cope with risk. Here's another example from my daughter's preschool. A singing, dancing, children's entertainer visited it recently and the kids had a ball. Yet that brief visit was the subject of a six-page risk and education assessment.

Then there's the huge shift in the way children travel these days. From 1970 to 1997, the proportion of ACT students who walked or rode to school or university fell from 59.1 per cent to 37.2 per cent. A separate, more recent study of Year 6 pupils showed that, in the three years to 2009, the share who rode or walked to school dropped from 30.5 per cent to 24.3 per cent. And yet another survey, carried out in 2010, found that just over one in 10 of Canberra's primary school pupils walked to school without an adult.

It's easy to fall into the nostalgia trap; pining for a way that we were never were. Yet today's parents are clearly far more risk-averse than the generation that raised them. We fret needlessly about bacteria and try to obliterate it from our children's lives, and probably harm them in the process. Moral panics about stranger danger gather force in defiance of actual crime trends, limiting our kids' independence. I grew up in western Sydney in the 1980s and loved walking home with my primary school mates, because it usually involved an adventurous detour through the local creek. Yet I question whether I'd grant my own children this freedom.

No one can stop parents worrying. I just hope that our policymakers aren't washing their hands of their responsibility to apply evidence to their decisions.

Markus Mannheim edits The Public Sector Informant. Send your tips to aps6@canberratimes.com.au