Washing baby's toys before first use?

emweaver

Tiddlywinks wrote: »

This is why I think that plastic toys for young children (young enough to shove anything in their mouths) should be washed.

I wouldn't fancy sucking anything straight off the floor of a factory in a third world country so why would I expect a child to have to do it.

For me, it's not so much about the germs but about the chemicals / residue from the manufacturing process.

Do you wipe all the toys down at xmas?

Tiddlywinks

emweaver wrote: »

Do you wipe all the toys down at xmas?

Only those for the littlies young enough to shove them straight in their mouths... and that means they are normally so young that the delay in them getting hold of he new toy isn't really a problem as they are easily distracted.

ellay864

I never washed my sons' toys. I can understand the idea of wiping to remove stuff from manufacture but not from the germs point of view, unless you are gong to rigorously clean them before every use they get - there's more germs gonna get there from regular use than sitting in a packet

choccybuttons

Hi

when i caught my eldest licking the floor when he started crawling and chewing shoes if he got the chance. I gave up cleaning toys. Toddler group is hilarious as they are constantly swapping dribble soaked toys, it freaked me out at first but hasn't harmed my two - I try to think of it as herd immunity lol

paul2012

Interesting post, we don't wash the kids toys (would be there forever with all the Lego :rotfl:) but we are having a new baby and was just about to ask about washing toys....would any of you suggest washing the play mat? its material so washable and i was told i should was all clothes/teddy in non-bio before hand as babies skin is sensitive?

Chaos_Monkey

paul2012 - I'm due our first baby next year, and will be washing clothes/soft toys/bedding/anything that will survive the washing machine before first use. It just makes sense to me. n Never mind factory floors, shop store rooms are generally pretty grimy places. Hard toys I'll probably bung through the dishwasher if I think they'll survive. Again, it's not necessarily for the germs, but the general grot.

I think there's a difference between washing stuff for newborns, and washing stuff for toddlers though.

moomoomama27

Nope! Just handed them straight out of the box! Same with clothes, have never washed clothes until they have worn them!

emweaver

At what age do you stop washing their toys? I don't think I have the energy to wipe down all the toys for my 3 girls xmas day even if they were to let me.

FunWithFlags

Thanks for the replies everybody! I prewash them to get the plasticy smell off and potential germs from the factory and/or people touching the toys in the shop. It's more the plastic smell though because I don't like the smell of it so it makes me feel a little weird to have baby chomping on it lol. I prewash new clothes too mostly because of the chemically smell a lot of them seem to have and also to stop any potential dye leaking happening. I don't think it's "too OCD" (hate that expression) to do this either, it just seems sensible to me to wash things off when I dont know where they have been or who has touched them when they are 100% going to go in baby's mouth lol. It's been interesting to see everyone's opinions though, seems there's a few of us in both camps haha!

fawd1

paul2012 wrote: »

Interesting post, we don't wash the kids toys (would be there forever with all the Lego :rotfl:) but we are having a new baby and was just about to ask about washing toys....would any of you suggest washing the play mat? its material so washable and i was told i should was all clothes/teddy in non-bio before hand as babies skin is sensitive?

Never washed toys, maybe a wipe down if they were obviously grimy but I have washed playmats. Only reason being that my two used to dribble, or vomit on it, quite a lot. At least as newborns, they used to posset a lot so apart from the hygiene issue, it would just smell rank. :rotfl: