To be loosing my mind over DC using bottled microplastic-y water for years

Well there are microplastics in fish now aren't there so it's pretty impossible to avoid.

My DC has a water bottle that's metal on the inside for school most schools shouldn't mind. I wasn't even thinking of the micro plastics but if a plastic bottle is in the sun it starts to taste weird and ik most classrooms the water bottles get left near the window. I think a metal one is a good investment it's lasted years whereas whenever we had plastic bottles before they'd break every other month

Why can't you just use one of those filtered pitchers and drink tap water?

I refuse to buy water in plastic bottles, and very few plastic-packaged products at all. For example, I use laundry sheets that come in a cardboard sleeve instead of big jugs of laundry detergent, etc. Where there's a will there's a way.

Exactly. And it’s why you can’t drive yourself crazy over it.

Your Dc have been exposed because they live in a modern world. But roll back to pre-plastics and there’s a much higher chance they’d have died in infancy or from some childhood disease we now vaccinate against.
To live is to face risk and to love is to fear. I get that a world that seemed perfectly ok when you were just responsible for yourself suddenly seems completely inadequate when you bring something as precious as your baby into it. Welcome to motherhood: the joy and the angst.

The other thing I would say op is I think heated plastic is a far bigger issue than cold liquid in a plastic bottle.

I try not to worry about cold food or drink in plastic ( I mean it practically all is
if you buy any amount from a supermarket.) However I don’t really use ready meals fullstop and would never heat them in the plastic container they come in. Ditto why I don’t like microwaves. So if you don’t do much of that, your Dc are no worse off. Plenty of Dc grew up with mum binging a plastic container into the microwave to warm up their dinner.

the odds are that my kids have way way more in their systems than the average.

I doubt it. Most kids regularly drink from reusable plastic cups and bottles. Even if they drink tap water, the water is often mixed with squash which comes from a plastic bottle. Most babies have plastic or silicone dummies. They eat from plastic spoons.

And in practical terms give them glass bottled water I think tap water is going to make you worry too.

There’s nothing you can do about it except change to a filter. If you’re obsessively worrying about what harm it may or may not have caused, take a look at some CBT worrying techniques, like having a set worry time (I will only worry about this for ten mins each day and do structured worry journalling in this time). The problem with worrying and researching all the time is it makes you feel like you’re doing something, but you’re actually just feeding it/ making it worse. It’s especially hard when what you’re worrying about involves uncertainty (what if this has possibly hurt them/ will hurt them in the future) but you have to find a way to manage it/ calm it down. I speak as someone who freaked out about lead piping in the water supply for their new house, so I do understand!

Sadly op I think that’s just the world we live in now . Every so often things flare up about what Wi-Fi does to us or mobile phones frying our brains etc. The world is just highly polluted by all sorts of junk and each of us affected by something or other. Just all get on and live your best lives. You can always find something more to worry about: life is full of it.

They've found microplastics in the placentas of unborn babies. Microplastics are in food. I really think that ship has sailed.

This sounds like health anxiety. Microplastics aren't great (obviously) but this level of worry about it is concerning. And if you think about it on a logical level, there are many more things that pose more of a threat to your children as they grow up.

The additives and chemicals, sugar and salt in the food you eat in the US will kill you before bottled water does.

Worrying about microplastics is like worrying about UV rays from the sun. There’s no escaping them. You can do things to reduce the amount of exposure like not using plastic containers or utensils that are scratched, but you’ll never be able to eliminate ingestion.

Millions of people die each year due to lack of clean water. We are very lucky to live in a part of the world where clean water is readily available, where we can quench our thirst and bathe without having to worry about contracting cholera. Please stop googling and try to put this into perspective.

When I moved to a very old property with possible lead pipes the advice was not to worry about it. The insides of the pipes will be lined with so much limescale that lead poisoning wasn’t a possibility.

You could give your DC 100% mountain spring water and feed them nothing but organic goat droppings from your grass fed mountain herd and they'd just go off to uni and eat pot noodle, haribo and blue raspberryade for three years.

This. None of us can avoid the microplastics and chemicals in the environment like BPA, BPS etc, they are everywhere. Including clothes. It’s just how it is now. But it does sound like your tap water is best avoided so I’d probably stick with what you were doing.

Life is about risk, OP. We are dying from the day we're born. There are lots of things that might be bad for us..... or not. There is absolutely zero point in worrying about any of them. And your kids will be fine.

OP my family is a health anxiety family too. Organic fruit, natural fibres, no UPFs and so on. We've gone the bottled / filtered in plastic water route because the tap water seems like the worst option of two bad options. I don't think you will have harmed your kids with the plastic.

I don't know about the US, but where I am most milk comes in plastic too. It's just one of those things. All you can do is reduce the harm as much as you are able, which sometimes means deciding between two harmful things.

Also, take the stuff in the news with a pinch of salt. Researchers are doing their job, but is also helps their careers (and those of journalists) to big up their findings. Next article will be about how something else will kill you (in a hundred years time....)

I'm a health worrier too. Look, put it in perspective. Consuming plastic is pretty harmless overall. Consuming junk food is wayyyyy worse. How do you know? Because you can see the effects straight away.... Besides, kids are growing, what's in their bodies now will only be a fraction of them as adults.

I've filed microplastics in the 'we all have to die of something' file. Along with bacon, sausages and whatever oil is being touted as the dangerous one this month