Increasing handwashing in young children: A brief review

Jess et al. (2020) looked at every hand-washing study they could find on preschool kids. They did not run new kids; they simply read, grouped, and told us what works.

The paper is a short narrative review, not a formal meta-analysis. It ends with a clear recipe: prompt, model, reinforce, and track.

Across the papers, four moves showed up again and again: tell the child to wash, show how, give something good right after washing, and record if it happened.

No single trick won; the package did. The authors urge us to stack all four parts, not pick one.

Halbur et al. (2022) gives a live demo. They used prompts plus momentary DRO to cut face-touching in autistic kids. Same four-part spirit, different germ-spread behavior.

Zhou et al. (2018) beat Jess on rigor. Their 2018 systematic review on feeding “packing” used stricter search rules, so it supersedes Jess’s looser narrative style.

Van Arsdale et al. (2024) extends the idea to feeding. They scoped 15 studies where free reinforcement was tucked into meals, showing the package idea travels across routines.

You already prompt and reinforce for compliance. Add a quick visual check-off and a tiny edible or sticker right at the sink. The review says that combo is the fastest way to make hand-washing stick in preschool rooms, special ed or typical.