Earthing and children: how it can improve your child's health
Earthing can improve children's health by promoting better sleep, reducing stress, and enhancing concentration. Parents' experiences show that earthing has positive effects. Discover how you can help your child earth for a healthier life!
Children ground themselves. Barefoot across the garden, hands in the sand, stretched out on the grass: until they are about five it happens by itself. Then come the shoes, the paved playground and the hours indoors, and most of that contact disappears. Below is what has been measured about it and how to bring it back in practice.
What has been measured in children
The most convincing research in this area concerns the very smallest. In 2017 Passi and colleagues followed twenty-six premature babies in a neonatal unit. As soon as the grounding was connected, the voltage on their skin fell from 415 to 19 millivolts, and vagal tone rose by 67 percent. Published in Neonatology.
Vagal tone is a measure of how strongly the body's rest and recovery system is switched on. In newborns that measurement is particularly valuable, for a simple reason: a baby has no expectations about what grounding is supposed to do. What gets measured is not coloured by what someone hopes to feel.
All the studies, with year and number of participants, are in scientific evidence for grounding.
Outdoors you barely have to organise anything
The easiest step is not to stop them: let them go barefoot. In the garden, on the grass in the park, at the water's edge on the beach. Damp grass or wet sand conducts distinctly better than bone-dry ground, so early in the morning or after a shower of rain works best.
Mostly, watch where they are walking: glass and sharp branches are the real objection, not the theory. There is more on that in walking barefoot outdoors.
Indoors: the bed is the obvious place
During the day, sustained contact is even less likely with children; they do not sit still for two minutes. In bed it is different, and they spend longer there than adults do. A sheet under the fitted sheet, or a sleeping mat if you only want to do part of the bed, is therefore the practical route. The pillowcase is the smallest step: you change nothing about the bed and your child notices nothing.
For older children who spend a lot of time at a screen for homework or gaming, the desk mat does the same under their forearms.
Practical and safe
No current flows through the cable. The plug uses only the earth pin and contains a 100,000 ohm resistor; how that works is covered in grounding: safe and effective.
What does need attention with a child's bed is the cable itself, as with any cable in a bedroom. Run it tight along the bed frame or behind the bed, so no loop lies loose in the bed. With very young children and in cots, I would simply not do it.
For the contact, the same applies as for adults: directly on the skin conducts best, but pyjamas or an ordinary fitted sheet over the earthing product still conducts perfectly well. With children that is often the practical choice anyway, because they perspire and spill, and that ordinary sheet is easier to wash, and washed more often, than the earthing product itself. Only through a thick duvet does little happen. And leave out the fabric softener, because it works against conductivity.
What not to expect from it
Earthle does not sell medical devices, and grounding does not replace treatment. If your child has health complaints, takes medication, or there is something worrying you, go to your GP or paediatrician. Grounding is not an alternative to that step and we do not present it as one.
What it is: restoring contact that children used to have automatically. What parents report back about it is almost always about settling and sleeping through more calmly; those are experiences, not research findings, and they vary from child to child.
Where to start
Which size fits your child's bed, and what you need if the room has no earthed socket, is what the guide at the bottom of the shop page asks you in a few short steps. If there is no earth pin, it still works through an earthing rod in the garden; that is covered in grounding without an earthed socket.
You have thirty days to change your mind, so you can try it for a few weeks and see for yourself whether it does anything to the nights in your house.
