Kids Save You From Colds

Parenting is one of the most important jobs you could ever do. But sometimes being a parent also means having more colds floating around the house.

Being a parent has its good parts and its not so good parts. But now it looks like having children might actually protect you from catching a cold.

As we say in medicine, children tend to be a walking petri dish. In other words, they pick up just about every cold and flu out there, especially during the winter months. And when they pick them up, they bring them home.

But a new study, just published in Psychosomatic Medicine, has found that, believe it or not, parents actually have a lower risk of catching a cold because of their children. This happened even after the parents in the study had the cold virus sprayed directly into their noses. So, even though the virus was in their body, they were less likely to get colds than non parents. And this protection from colds went up with the number of kids in the house.

Although researchers aren't exactly sure why this is happening, they think it might have to do with our responses to infections and things in our bodies known as cytokines that give us immunity to things like colds. Parents tend to have cytokines that worked better at fighting off the common cold.

So this next cold and flu season if you don't get sick, you might just want to thank your children.