Toxic jammies?
Who thought shopping for pjs for a 4year old could be stressful? I unassumingly walked into a store with my son giving him carte blanche to choose some warm jammies for the upcoming cooler months. He immediately gravitated to a pair with a fire engine print. I picked it up to look at it and noticed several tags hanging from it, one of which declared that the garment was flame resistant. Why had I never noticed this before? Have I been innocently putting my son to bed wrapped up in chemicals? I needed answers.
If you’ve never heard of PBDE (Polybrominated Diphenyl Ether), you should acquaint yourself, after all you’re living with them, we all are. Household products ranging from kids’ pajamas to computers release these brominated flame retardants according to the Environmental Working Group. The obvious goal of these chemicals is to reduce the risk that the product will catch fire. The problem however, is that these chemicals via dust and off-gasing enter the body and accumulate. These same chemicals have recently been turning up in tests done on breastmilk. In fact these same tests have found that toddlers and preschoolers typically had 3 times as much of these hormone-disrupting chemicals in their blood as their mothers. Why are our children more polluted by these chemicals than us? Because these nasty PBDEs stick to kids’ hands, toys, furniture or other objects that they put in their mouths.
