N == 1, my mother loves cleanliness and I lived in a very clean environment when I was a kid. I was also sick all the damn time.

Once I went away from home at 18, my natural slobbiness prevailed. I am not a horrible pig, but nowhere near as keen on washing hands or fruit or wearing freshly pressed clothes as my mom is. And my immunity started improving visibly.

As of now, I am 44 y.o. I almost never get sick, and if I do, it rarely lasts more than two days. I haven't had antibiotics prescribed since 2012 I think. If something itches in my throat, I flush my nose with salty/mineral water and the problem goes very reliably away.

Even most of my alergies just went away, with the weird exception of cat allergy that I acquired in adult age.

This is frequent, be glad you don't have lasting allergy issues like many do after being raised by 'germ freaks' to be impolite (its hard for me to be polite when parents damage lives and health of their kids with some fanatical zeal).

I know few cases which are left with reduced quality of life (and probably length too) due to this, no matter what they try to overcome this.

"its hard for me to be polite when parents damage lives and health of their kids with some fanatical zeal"

To be honest, my mom raised me in the early 1980s, when the knowledge about risks of cleanliness was simply not there, especially not in popular science sources available behind the Iron Curtain.

Nowadays, I am much more respectful about the need to interact with various germs, commensal and symbiotic microbiota, but I have the advantage of having Internet at my disposal. Even so, it is not easy to strike the right balance. Germs may be good for you, but various chemicals used in agriculture definitely aren't and try getting rid of one while keeping the other intact. (Organic produce helps, but it is expensive to boot.)

Its not about 'risk of cleanliness' that I was talking about, I've been raised also behind Iron curtain during same period in your neighboring state. Nobody back then was saying absolute cleanliness was a way to go. Normal kind of approach had very mild side effects if any and ie kids cleaning their hands or face is overall not a bad approach and agreed upon even today.

I really meant some form of fanatical approach to it, which is never a good approach for anything. One didn't need internet for such common sense wisdom (aka middle path is practically always the best approach regardless of topic).

But surprisingly high proportion of population suffers from some form of germophobia, so maybe that's what you meant. Without any scientific feedback on good aspects of having them around, I guess some folks went a bit banana with that (since you can never clean way all the bacteria in common household due to their sheer numbers overcoming any approach, so people affected by it can escalate hygiene to extremes)

Beautifully even handed comment.