Dr. Saurabh's Child Clinic

Dear Parents ,

In my pediatric practice I regularly see children with damaged skin and reason for it many times is that parents are not aware of how to take care of the skin.I will discuss this topic under 3 headings

1.  Child age < 1 yr

2. Child age > 1 yr

3. Common practices that damages the skin

1. Child age < 1 yr

There is a triad to take care of skin, first is use oil to massage [ olive oil is considered good] ,then giving bath by using soap at skin pH [ eg. Tedibar , Cetaphil or Sebamed] and at last using a body lotion . Now I will elaborate these points. Oil massage should be gentle and the only purpose of massage is that skin absorbs the oil, so please no extra pressure to be applied while giving massage to the baby.Next is moisturization of theskin.It’s a common practice that body lotion is used once in a day but there is no rule as to how many times in a day body lotion can be used.So feel free to use it once, twice or thrice according to the need of the skin.

2. Child age > 1 yrs

Here also we follow triad of using soap at skin pH ( eg. Tedibar, Cetaphil or Sebamed) , body lotion and sunscreen lotion. Oil massage can be continued or stopped according to parents choice . There are lots of apprehensions about the safety of sunscreen use , I would like to assure parents the sunscreen use is completely safe for a child more than 1 year. And while buying it just see that the SPF of the lotion is above 25 for good sun protection.

3. Common practices that damage the skin

I would like to enumerate these – like not using body lotion , using gram flour/ turmeric and milk for bath, not using sunscreen lotion, using dettol in washing clothes are few common practices.

I hope the article was helpful. Please feel free to leave comments.