When your little one is enjoying the outdoors during the summer months, sunscreen is an extremely important consideration. The use of sunscreen is recommended only for those children that are six months of age and older. Younger children should be kept completely out of the direct sunlight during ten a.m. and four p.m., which are the peak hours. There has been several reasons that the use of sunscreen on children that are younger than six months of age has been considered a hazard, one of them being that infants particularly have a high surface to volume area which in turn means that their dose or exposure of sunscreen is going to be a lot higher than that of an older child or adult. Even though the effect of this exposure is actually unknown, there is the possibility of having an adverse reaction which may also be heightened. Sunscreen can also block the cooling mechanism that infants have within the form of sweating, which can possibly cause overheating.
So, now the debate isn’t about what age to put sunscreen on a child, but what brand you should use. Most parents out there have made the assumption that are sunscreens can be deemed equal. However, a recent report and investigation that was performed by the EWG or Environmental Working Group has found that this isn’t the case. The Environmental Working Group rated and categorized the efficacy and safety of eight hundred and twenty eight well known sunscreens strictly on the basis of safety concerns and sun protection. What they found was that eighty four percent of the eight hundred and twenty eight brands didn’t protect against the sun and posed other possible health risks. One hundred and ten of these sunscreen brands are marketed for the use in children and infants. They found ten sunscreens that were marketed to children and infant that offered good protection from the sun with minimal health risk.
So, as you can see, choosing a sunscreen to use on your child is going to take some careful consideration and a little research in order to make sure that you find the right sunscreen to protect your little one from the sun. Make sure when purchasing a sunscreen that you read the labels on the bottle to make sure that it offers the type of protection that you need, you will also need to check the ingredients in the sunscreen as well to make sure there aren’t any ingredients that could potentially harm your child.