When I discovered at my triplets’ 12 month peds appointment that they were lead-poisoned, I was stunned.
When I dove down a rabbit hole of research and realized how common and easy it is for kiddos to be lead-poisoned, even in 2025–I was aghast.
How had I not known these things before they were poisoned?
Why isn’t every parent who lives in a pre-1978 home educated about the lifesaving importance of getting their home tested for lead before they have kids?
Why aren’t parents told that up to 78% of Michigan kids have detectable levels of lead in their blood that can cause a host of difficult-to-diagnose health issues–and what they should be looking out for? Why aren’t parents told that many popular children’s food brands contain unsafe levels of lead?
For all the parents whose kiddo hasn’t been exposed, or poisoned, and you want to keep it that way — this is for you.
For the parents, like me, whose kiddo has suffered from lead, and you grieve that you didn’t know how prevalent and dangerous lead is before it happened–this is also for you.
Here are the personal and community steps you can take to protect your children before they suffer from lead.
Personally
- Get your child’s lead levels checked. The Washtenaw County health department will test any child under the age of 6 for free. This will help ensure a baseline for you of whether or not there’s been exposure–and if so, you now have a baseline to monitor and make sure it goes down as you try to discover where they’re getting exposed.
- Get your water tested for lead, no matter when your home was built. Lead solder and faucets were still legal through 2014.
- Test your home if it was built pre-1978. The Washtenaw County health department can help you find the right company to test your home for lead or offer you additional resources.
- Avoid high-risk ingredients in snacks. There are some ingredients that consistently test high in lead–such as cassava, sunflower seeds, and cinnamon. (Cinnamon was the leading culprit in the lead poisoning of hundreds of children in 2023 by applesauce pouches.)
- Consider using snacks that have been tested to be lead-free, such as GoGo applesauce (plain), Pure Organic fruit bars, or Once Upon a Farm puffs.
- Eliminate high-risk activities. Don’t let your kiddo play with keys, bathe in a clawfoot tub, or put art paint/chalk in their mouth; Don’t use imported toys (China, for example, has little lead regulations), cheap toys (Temu and Wish source from low-regulation countries), or vintage plates; And don’t let them wear cheap kid jewelry (especially imported), or go near a relative who’s just come back from the shooting range or been fishing with lead sinkers.And definitely don’t let your child go into a room with peeling pre-1978 paint. It only takes a speck of lead paint to harm a child, and lead dust can travel across the floor in microscopic amounts. Jane Nickert, the head nurse at the Washtenaw County health department, says that lead exposure can happen even through intact paint if it’s a high-friction area like a doorway or a window. That means that even if the paint is totally intact, if there’s any lead in the paint levels underneath, it can still be a risk.
- Serve a diet that helps the body not absorb as much lead! This is a diet high in iron, vitamin C, calcium, and garlic. (Check out our article here for more information on how to do this easily and effectively.)
- Create an enriching environment for your child. This is a great thing to do anyway–and it’s been shown to help protect a child against lead’s negative impact. Anything that supports brain development is helpful to protect a child from the damaging effect of lead.
Communally
The biggest problem with a “personal” solution to lead poisoning is that this isn’t a personal problem. It’s a community problem. Many parents can’t afford the price tag to remediate lead in their home.
RELATED: Supporting Your Child’s Recovery from Lead Poisoning: What to Buy, Bake and Brew
Just tackling lead paint alone can cost up to $30,000. That’s not including the cost of replacing doors or windows, that’s just encapsulating or removing lead paint in a safe manner in the average home.
Since my family lives in a historic district in Detroit, we have to repair–not replace–our historic windows in order to follow historic guidelines and still rid them of lead. This puts the price tag near $80,000 — a mind-boggling number, but an unavoidable one if I want my triplets to be protected from the lead in the window frames! (The “cheaper” solution, which we’ve looked into, is only repairing one window per bedroom and in the main rooms, and sealing over the rest, but that’s still estimated at over $2,000 a window.)
My family’s home is historic, so it means our remediation price tag is far more expensive than your average home–but even average homeowners often can’t afford the remediation prices on our own.
But even if we, as a community, don’t care about other people’s kids (which, we should) —it still saves everyone money to tackle the lead problem as a community.
For example, a report in 2018 showed that preventing lead exposure in children born only in 2018 would save the United States $84 billion from savings in healthcare, education, higher lifetime earnings, reduced juvenile and adult crime, and longer life expectancy.
In Michigan, lead poisoning in our kiddos costs us $270 million — $112 million of which is paid by taxpayers.
70% of our kiddos are poisoned by lead paint and dust hazards in home. One study shows that if 100,000 of the homes in MI most at risk were successfully lead-abated, it would cost $600 million and return $190 million annually to Michiganders ($78 million of which will be cost savings to MI taxpayers).
Another estimate says for every $1 spent to remediate lead paint, we would reap benefits up to $17-221, which is a crazy return.
Remediation of lead in homes, even at a conservative estimate, is estimated to fully pay for itself in three years.
Okay, great–but what can we do on the community level?
- Educate your community on the dangers of lead poisoning and how prevalent it still is. Share the articles in our lead series, or share other articles or videos on how to protect your children from lead, how to get tested, etc!
- Write or call our governor and Congress members of the importance of increasing the Health Department budget to test for lead, provide resources for parents, and remediate lead. (Resistbot is an incredibly easy, two-minute way to write letters to your representatives. 5Calls is an incredibly easy, five-minute way to make phone calls to them!)
- Write our president and federal Congress members about the same. (If figuring out how to find addresses or phone numbers feels overwhelming to you, use Resistbot or 5Calls! They do 90% of the work for you.)
- Other important agencies that help manage research or resources into lead poisoning that you can call or write: the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), The National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
- Support programs like Early On (a free intervention service for babies ages 0-3 that helps many children, including those exposed to lead) by raising awareness about it, volunteering your time or resources, or contacting your reps and urging them to support Early On.
- Support your local school — help develop a plan to test the school for lead (if built before 1978), test the water, or install filters. Advocate for serving foods that are rich in iron, calcium, and vitamin C. Advocate for more school funding to target lead exposure in particular.
- Partner with programs like Environment America Research and Policy Center, who study problems like lead contamination in schools’ drinking water. (Michigan’s scored an F: we still have no laws that prevent contamination.)
If you have other ideas of how we, as people or as a community, could protect our children from lead–please, send us an email and let us know!
