How to make boundaries with brothers partner, without upsetting everyone.

[touringmymind]

My brother has a new partner of 2 years and she’s lovely and good with his children, the issue for me is that she has very high standards compared to us and will expect my children to use her hand sanitiser if they have been on a swing or touched a railing or something public.

I don’t have these expectations with my children but when we are out together, she asks all the children including hers, my niece/nephews and mine and they all do.
She was reminding my children not to touch things or to discard a bottle of drink because it had been on the floor, something that doesn’t usually concern us.
I notice if my mum joins us she has started to remind everyone to sanitise all the time now which is not something we’ve regularly done, She is quite concerned with anything going on the floor like a handbag and any toys that have been in the garden or dropped on the floor are cleaned.
I don’t want to change to fit in with her but my brother seems to get quite angry if we don’t all go along with this when we’re together.
Would you just do it for her or be yourself?
I notice my brother has adapted to her expectations and so have my parents.
Dh and I think we should just be ourselves but my mum thinks if we don’t play along we will exclude ourselves.

We consider ourselves to have good standards of cleanliness but we don’t want to have to meet the standards of someone who lives in a show home and obsessively washes their hands every time they touch something because in my mind she potentially has a MH issue and I don’t see why our family should be humouring this.
I feel like saying something when she starts squirting sanitizer in my children’s palms because they picked up a stick or a shell but I don’t want to upset my brother who is so taken with her he’s going along with all this.

I realise in the scheme of things it may sound like I’m making more of this than I should but I find it weird that the whole family have just changed to fit in with someone who has just come into the family.

It’s not as if we are unhygienic or live in filth, we are just a normal family who aren’t obsessed with germs but it seems we’ll be ostracised if we don’t play along and meet her approval.
I miss when we were all just ourselves, that’s what family is to me.

It’s hard to comment specifically because we don’t know what your level of hygiene standards are OP. My basics are always after using the toilet, always before eating, always before preparing food, always after being outside. My issue with parks is that the swings could have had teenagers stood on them with dog crap residue on their shoes, it’s a high traffic area and if no kids aren’t washing hands afterwards it’s a haven for germs. So I would encourage washing hands after being at the park, same with being in the garden, picking up things outside too.

But equally there are people in the world who think nothing of eating with dirty hands and not washing hands after toilet, I suppose it’s down to self respect or personal standards.

It is a really tricky one. From experience of dysfunctional families they tend to adapt around the dysfunctional people’s behaviour, normalise and tolerate it to extremes to keep the peace. The person who calls out the dysfunction tends to get the blame. Very, very common, beware.

I’d go down the road of bringing out the things you DO want. Chatting as part of wider conversations about the world. Take it out to wider benefits and risks - because the risks of not feeling at home in the outside world are really large and varied. Chat about what you want for your kids to have during their childhood - climbing trees, feeling grass and flowers, understanding bugs and insects, knowing what plants aren’t nice (stinging nettles - harmless learning experience), and which are nice - smell the flowers. Having a butterfly land on your hand… making a den, pond dipping, picking up a ladybird, rolling down a hill, lying on the grass seeing shapes in the clouds. None of these work with her world view; but if you talk about them she at least can see what the benefits are, and what you do t want to lose. It might not look like a criticism then.

the National Trust did a ‘50 things to do before you’re 11’ campaign a couple of years ago, maybe use that as inspiration?

Here it is
www.nationaltrust.org.uk/visit/50-things

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I would politely ask her not to use frequent hand sanitizer on my children as I don't like them to be over exposed to chemicals - as one of mine has eczema, this wouldn't be a lie, hand sanitiser would be terrible for her skin. We have horses so I expect children to get a bit grubby when they are having fun - it's clean dirt, as the saying goes. No one is going to squirt chemicals on my children every few minutes on mu watch.

I wouldn't be too free with the 'good for their immune system' response without being clear you mean just everyday dirt, not actual diseases. Some people make that exact mistaken argument to suggest it's fine to spread around flu or chicken pox or covid or whatever to young children as if those will somehow help their immune systems, and if she thinks that's what you're saying she might just write you off as ill-informed and feel even more justified in following her own rules.

If you do get into a conversation with her about it, I'd start by agreeing how important it is to wash hands before eating and going inside. Show that you do actually care about preventing illness and a certain basic level of hygiene, and that it's only the doing it every two minutes that you don't do.

You might also mention to her that when she's not with you, that policy is what you've followed with your kids hundreds of times, and that to the best of your knowledge that's worked fine. That's a bit like exposure and response prevention at one remove and it can be quite effective.

I don't mean saying "well this is what I do and it works" in an argumentative way, more gently presenting the fact that when she isn't there to worry about what touches your children's hands, nothing bad is happening. That gives her helpful evidence of how statistically tiny is the chance of something catastrophic happening from hands not being constantly clean, when right now the loudest voice in her head is saying she must remove every chance of something catastrophic happening, because if she doesn't something bad will almost certainly happen.

That all said, the point about dog poo is a fair one (or cat poo when play digging in flower beds) - when I had a very young toddler I was a bit more cautious about where their hands had been straight away if they were likely to put them in their mouth a lot. I'd still aim just to clean their hands, not sanitise them with hand sanitiser though - I wouldn't want the chemicals going onto their skin unless it was absolutely unavoidable.

At her place her rules, at your place the rules apply to her children. Does she have an underlying health issue? I am asking cause I never had any rules for my children but since I got diagnosed with a chronic illness and I m getting immunesupressants the rules have changed both for my kids any any guests and I very strict with sterilising removing shoes etc as I am at risk.

You're absolutely not overreacting. She's trying to foist her germ phobia on your DC.

We as humans are supposed to be exposed to a germs here and there.

Do you think she may have OCD? If so, she won't be able to help herself unfortunately.