Shared underwear in a nursery

[MD1]

Please calm me down as I cannot find a place to sit on. My DD started a nursery in Central London and it's fine in general but there is one rule which I was not aware of. If your child wets herself, they change to an underwear which was worn by (many) other children. They reassure me it's washed every time but I cannot calm down (you don't know how other parents wash it and with which other clothes D:). I did ask them if I still can bring mine for my DD every day and they said "No". Is it a common practice in nurseries? Please share your thoughts, experiences, pieces of advice. Thank you.

I think the trick is to not overthink anything to do with hygiene and toddlers. They are revolting little creatures. My DS (3) licked the drainpipe at nursery today while we were waiting to go in for no explicable reason. My DD (1) regularly pulls her brothers socks off to chew and their current game is to pretend to be the dog and to go around on all fours licking the floor 🫣 clean worn pants would be the least of my concerns.

Nursery worker here - we ask parents not to send spares in. First, we are based in a small church hall that doesn't have storage space for 30+ different bags of clothes. Second, when a child needs changing we like to do it quickly to get them warm and dry. If we have to search the coat pegs for one of 30+ bags it can take a while. With a set of our own spares we can just grab the box quickly. Despite us constantly asking, not everyone labels their children's clothes and bags. It would be awful to put someone else's underwear on the wrong person. And finally, when spares come back in we can always tell if they've been washed and if we suspect otherwise we will put in with our washing.
Hope this reassures you.

I have donated outgrown pants to our local preschool and they were very happy to have them. My two have come home in spare pants from time to time when they were little, never occurred to me to worry about it! As others have said, little kids are pretty generous about sharing germs by sneezing on each other, touching things and sucking their thumbs/picking their noses, not washing hands properly after toilet etc etc. the laundry regime is not something to worry about!
The exception would be if your child has a known issue with eczema or similar that is set off by some washing powders. Then you would have reason to talk to the nursery.
I imagine the 'don't bring spares' policy is because at some point in the past child A has gone home wearing child B's clothes by accident and parent of child B has kicked off.

@MD1 I don’t have children but I remember as a child at primary school if you had an accident you would be dressed in clothing from the ‘spare clothes’ box. I don’t know if this is still the case but I can’t imagine many children of school age carry a change of clothes with them every day (except maybe PE kit but that wouldn’t include underwear). I probably would expect a child at nursery to take a change of clothes as the need for them would be higher but if those are the rules the nursery has implemented then that’s just how it is.

Also having been a child, having friends with kids and having several nieces and nephews of my own I have never heard of adult clothing being washed separately to children’s. I guess there may have been an exception for newborns but in most homes I think all laundry just uses the same detergent, baby sensitive if needed.

They do it in Reception classes in school

It's been going on since time immemorial and I've yet to hear that it's caused problems.

Please stop worrying

you sound like you’ve got some sort of germ phobia. If the clothes aren’t clean upon return I’m sure the nursery staff will tell the parents. I don’t think you need to worry about anything. And why are you washing adult/kd clothes separately?

I spat out my tea laughing at this! 🤣🤣

Actually the children's clothes get infected with essence of adult and become adults.
That's definitely true because my babies are now 18 and 20.

Of course many families wash all their clothes together, not by adult/child. Not sure why you'd do that beyond tiny baby stage.

I didn't separate them at tiny baby stage either!

I’d have a bit of an issue with this actually, not because of hygiene issues but because DD had eczema (much better now than it was) and she reacted horribly to some
detergents so we had very specific ways to wash her clothing including extra rinse cycles to get as much out as possible.

We always sent a huge quantity of spare clothes including pants so she never wore nursery spares. She had changes of clothes most days and I wouldn’t have sent her anywhere that couldn’t have her own things.

I’d happily have her in spare pants that weren’t hers apart from the detergent issue though. But it does sound like a freaky set up.

Completely normal. Also, do you really think that nurseries put children in dirty underwear?? Just send in plenty of spares for your own child & every thing will be ok.

To be honest you sound like you’re severely over reacting. Do you think there could be sexually transmitted infections hiding in a pair of toddlers pants?

Lol pretty sure everywhere does this including schools

I remember wetting myself In reception and I got some of the spare underwear. I remember my friend wetting herself too and she got funky pants with planets on I was very jealous haha!

It's odd that they don't let you bring in spares.

I've seen people wash clothes in a crazy amount of soap that I'd find irritating to the skin and not want touching my kids body all day if I could help it.

At our school they all have a spare set in bags in KS1, their clothes are so little they don’t take up much room. We send 3 pairs pants, polo shirt and trousers. Mine is the sort to go head first in a puddle!

Very odd that they don’t accept spares, although I know many many times I have been to a child’s bag and there is nothing of any use in there!

it may just be easier for them in terms of not having to go and locate spares from a bag (which probably won’t be named) and leave a soggy upset child while they do this etc etc. it may just be a logistics thing and it’s quicker for them.

In the grand scheme of things, I couldn’t get worked up about it!

They aren’t allowed their own spares, which is weird!

I imagine it's too time consuming searching through each child's bag when there might not be any pants in there anyway - wasting time that could be spent doing more entiching activities. Plus the possibility mentioned above of giving out the wrong child's underwear by mistake. It's easier to have a blanket ban.