by Victorian Squid » Sat Mar 17, 2012 12:33 pm
The reason I have experience with similar stuff is that my parents are old enough to be senior citizens, and their formative years were before modern hygiene standards were established. Most people don't realize how recently not far back into the 20th C Pepsodent was successful in bringing toothpaste into the American household and made it a daily routine. Weekly (or worse) baths. Archaic folk wisdom, some of which is just entirely wrong. It took me until I was an adult to realize my parents just hadn't been taught a lot of information I took for granted, and that for instance the reason there were never any hand towels out in their bathroom was that no one really washed their hands much. I had to teach them a lot of it, and encountered a surprising degree of resistance, just stubborn belligerent refusal to change. I remember when my Mom finally admitted no one had ever really taught her about germs or bacteria, for instance. It was a sign for me that we were finally making some progress then, and just for the record they've come a long way over the years but it happened fairly late in their lives to some degree.