Issues > March/April 2007 (#119) > Green Room to Grow In

Green Room to Grow In

"If there's one time in their lives when people are motivated to make healthy lifestyle changes, it's when they're about to have a baby," says Philip J. Landrigan, M.D., director of the Center for Children's Health and the Environment at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York. "As a pediatrician I encourage this, because fetuses and babies, whose systems are rapidly developing, are much more vulnerable to toxic substances than at any other time of life." As certain childhood cancer rates creep upward, childhood asthma incidence has doubled and learning disorders are also on the rise, parents would be wise to limit exposure to household toxins before their babies arrive. "There are many simple things you can do that will significantly reduce both health risks and your worries," says Landrigan, coauthor of Raising Healthy Children In a Toxic World: 101 Smart Solutions for Every Family.

For many parents nowadays, healthy means green. "I don't think you can separate the two," says Cara McCaffrey, a New York City mother. "Our furniture, our skin lotions, the food we eat, reducing and recycling plastics—every decision can have an impact on the air, soil, water and our health," Cara says.

Clean Air, Healthy Home

As her children Birk and Vale built with wooden blocks on a hemp area rug during this reporter's visit, Cara noted that the dark hardwood floor was polished with a no-VOC finish, free of petrochemical volatile organic compounds (VOCs) that produce the equivalent of indoor smog. She added that, with the help of green-minded decorator Renee Rizzuto, she's reupholstering her old couches and chairs. It's goodbye to the old polyurethane foam, treated with polybrominated diphenyl ether (PBDE) fire retardants, which cause developmental harm in animals and have infiltrated American women's breast milk. The new fillings will be organic cotton batting, natural latex and naturally fire-resistant wool. Organic cotton or hemp covers will be free of water and stain repellants that can emit formaldehyde and whose manufacture releases toxic perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA). Both McCaffrey children graduated from a custom bassinet fitted with a new wool mattress ("I had them make one for the pram, too," Cara says) to an organic mattress in an all-hardwood crib to twin organic mattresses covered with wool pads. "An organic, untreated crib mattress is the best investment you can make," Cara says, noting that it's much more affordable than an adult mattress, and the baby spends much more time asleep in its crib than grownups do.

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