Can you “smell” when your kids are ill?

[Countingdays]

Sometime ago, a friend of mine said ‘I recognise when my children are sick, because their smell changes’ - I remember thinking how odd at the time, but I’ve been smelling it since! Guess I never paid any attention to it before.

I can only describe it as a mixture of bad breath with mucus, but it’s very distinctive. Just yesterday, I smelt it on my daughter before any actual visible symptoms and lo and behold she woke up with a fever this morning!

has anyone ever noticed this?

@Whatbloodysummer
wow what an amazing story!! Not amazing that your DD went through that, but that you had those instincts!!

It really is truly just our animal 'instinct' rather than anything 'special'. And just like all our instincts, sometimes we ignore them?

If you ever watch any woman holding a small baby, every single one of them will put their noses to the baby's head and 'smell' them? They aren't even consciously aware that they're doing it most of the time.

Men don't do it, but women, and even girls, will do it every single time they hold a young infant. It doesn't seem to matter whether they have kids of their own or not, it's just an instinctual behaviour.

I guess it's for several 'animal' reasons?

Thousands of years ago women would likely 'smell' infants to ensure they were likely to survive, (just as cats/dogs etc do now) and that it was actually their own infant, and likely to detect illness etc too.

We may be an advances species, but we are still animals first and foremost?

That's why I always, always tell mothers to trust their 'instinct' when they sense something is wrong with their child, regardless of what doctors etc say, because a mother knows.

@Whatbloodysummer i do agree, I actually ‘smell’ my kids when I’m particularly stressed. It’s like a rush of calm to me.