to wish people would treat their children when they have head lice?

[beansmum]

ds has had head lice three times in the last month. Each time I get rid of them all with disgusting shampoo stuff and lots of combing and each time I send him back to school and he catches them again. SO annoying.

I asked the teacher if she would mind sending a note out to the parents telling them that someone in the class had them (i.e ds) and asking them to check their kids but she says there is no point as nobody will actually do it.

there is no point to this rant but I am really really tired of the stupid things and wish people would deal with them. I know ds would probably get them again anyway but it's just ALL the time. 3 times this month is ridiculous. Isn't it? Or is it normal?

Maybe we were just lucky! We were doing conditioning/combing after of course, to check for reinfestation, but we didn't need to repeat the treatment. Or maybe Fairy liquid worked some magic .

gingertoo I think you are right about parents not getting good information - your school sounds very enlightenend but our refuses to get involved as its apparently not a school problem.

I think it is a community problem and that the school is best placed to coordinate education and action.

We receive letters saying that kids in my DD's class has them but some must not bother as we receive the letters almost weekly. She has only had them once luckily, all I can really do is tie her hair back and use tea tree shampoo.

my school has notes sent out about it EVERY week. My ds got it a couple of years ago and it took a month to get rid of completely - so now I get seriously anal about checking. It takes ten minutes once a week to check through the hair. NOT A BIG DEAL. YANBU.

My DD caught it at 18 months .

She must have caught it from nursery as she had not been around any other children that week (???) but they said not

It was a nightmare as she has quite coarse curly hair and getting the nit comb through was quite painful for her.

She got it again 2 weeks later and am sure it was a fresh batch, despite nursery saying that she must have still had it. I really don't think she could have done as we had combed her hair every night (with the brilliant gritty nitty comb), we had used the lotion and they had gone, only to come back.

Fortunately she is now rid of it but am dreading schoo.

I now check her once a week, although to be honest, if she had them I think I would just be able to see immediately. They were horrid.

Our headteacher checks all childrens hair half termy and we don't have a problem anymore.
I think knowing that your child will be checked and sent home is an incentive for some to keep them clear.
It's a state primary.

asdx - where are you? i was under the impresion teachers were not allowed AT ALL to comment on individual children having nits, let alone actually search them - that probably counts as assault of some sort. Perhaps it is a matter of each LEA's policy?

seriously, teacher friends are always telling me that despite KNOWING which kids have nits they are not ALLOWED to send them home or even tell the parents, they have to do the letter to all the class thing, knowing that some parents will not bother!

DD came home last week telling me one child was COUNTING live lice out of his head onto the desk the other week!!! he had 8 of them running about on the table!!!

if, as a parent checking your kids hair you find ONE headlouse, you do not know how long it has been there and whether it has laid any eggs. - so 2 weeks later you may suddenly find them "infested"

on the other hand , they might catch one louse from a friend which is there on their head for a few days happily laying eggs, then drops off and dies, so you check the hair and think they are clear, then WHAM- 2 weeks later they are crawling again - without you having seen any adult lice at all on them

as an aside, you ARE all checking the whole family, grandparents etc if your kids have nits aren't you? cos one louse brought home from school could end up in mum or dads hair by bedtime, and you could have a whole infestation yourself before you know it

but enough of the yukky bit

I recommend tea tree shampoo and conditioner (tesco cheap one), nitty gritty comb to check with, and the occasional splash of neat tea tree oil in their hair in a morning. And mine are blissfully nit free (touches wood quickly)

oh, and finally...

thoroughly brushing or combing DCs DRY hair before bedtime even when not hairwash night also helps prevent infestation as it breaks the louse's legs so it falls off the head before it can start laying eggs

He is very open with all parents that he does check the children's hair and then invites school nurse to advise parents in school.
I assume the parents of any children identified are notified confidentially and asked to treat as dd never knows that anyone has been found to have anything.
Schools in Derbyshire at least the two primaries that my dc have attended do advise that children are to be kept at home until they have been treated.
At the other school no one actively checks hair but if a louse was spotted the parent would be asked to collect their child and treat.

This makes me so angry. Chidren infested with headlice suffer in other ways. It has a major impact on their sleeping ability hence the name "louse"

Two easy ways to check are for black dots on the scalp which are poo left overs and also the red rash at the back of the neck. This will not show until a full infestation and so regular wet combing is required.

The schools in the UK are fairly powerless to help but we wrote to the school governors and asked them to implement school policies such as hair to be worn up and treatment days where everyone treated their kids at the same time. Of course not everyone bothered but most parents do which has cut down infestations.

I also use tea tre oil in my DD's hair daily. I brush it through her roots and she has never has a problem since.

its a disgrace how parents get notes and still the same child who reinfects the whole class comes in scratching again... i work longside this child and see them clearly every day and the scratching.. yet when notes are given every 1 else is checked.... (angry)makes me so mad..

As a teacher HL are a frustrating problem -

For some reason Headlice in my LEA are not a serious enough reason for sending a child home As we would be preventing that child from infecting everyone else receiving an education.

If we spotted live lice (not nits) we used to be able to phone home & suggest that the child was collected & treated but if the parent said no, we were unable to insist. Now however, we are unable to even do that! Yet we can still send children home for other infectious complaints such as impetigo, ring worm etc

Now all we can do is continue sending home the generic "head lice have been reported in your child's class this week...." letter. Which gets sent out so often, that every book bag is full of them, so the parents have no idea when it was sent out. (except for efficient mum who checks her child's bag daily ) Also we tell the infected child's parent what we have spotted at the end of the day but cannot make sure that they treat them & cannot stop them from returning the next day untreated.

I got rather a stern telling off from the Educational welfare officer after a parent complained to him about having to leave work early to collect her child. She said she got them from school in the first place so why should she have to drop everything to collect her child!

Also Nitty Nora would have to ask parental permission first & the Louse family would defo decline - or be absent on the day!

I was a teacher in the US (New york City) where lice are also rampant. One thing that we did that schools don't seem to do here is to put kids' coats and bags in large plastic bags in the cloakroom. The lice don't jump but they DO crawl from jacket to jacket while in the cloakrooms. I always insist that dds put their coats in plastic bags when there is an outbreak and they've never had lice (yet, I know it's coming one of these days)

I don't know if anyone read this ridiculous article in Saturday's Guardian. I'm afraid I judged my pants off.

I just judged my pants off too

With that many live lice she couldn't have been doing it right- blue plastic comb and conditioner by lamplight indeed. This is meant to be an intelligent and educated woman but she obviously hasn't a clue!

Judge #3 here. I'm glad my dds were not in the same class as hers.

The worst any of my children have had was 20 or 30 live ones and that was when DD1 was little and got badly infested because I didn't know what I was looking for - 250 or more is beyond belief. The poor children must have been scratching their heads off.

We have had lice once, DD1 was 3 and picked them up from Pre-School. Head lice are a notifiable infection/infestation, you are supposed to tell the school/nursery who in turn are meant to inform the parents of the rest of the class. Threadworms aren't notifiable though, and it is these little bastards that plague us. I asked school to notify other parents and they said they couldn't or something, most annoying. One infestation lasted nearly 6 weeks, meaning I spent a fortune on tablets and seemed to be stripping beds every other day, it was a bloody night mare.

As for headlice needing to be on a host. My sister and I did an experiment after combing several lice out of my nieces hair a few years ago. We put them in a ventilated jar and left them, they died one after another, the smallest first, then the next smallest and so on, after about 5 days only the biggest was left, and it lasted at least 24 hours before giving up and dying. We are 100% certain it cannibalised it's comrades to stay alive as long as it did.

Have just read that article and i'm absolutley appalled at that woman!!!

How can any mother in her right mind allow that to go on for that amount of time!!!

I'm sick to death of middle class parents and their 'choices' to infect our kids with nits or - worse - measles, mumps and rubella. You know, if the author had been on benefits in a council house, persistent headlice infestation would have been one indicator of kids at risk that social services would have noted in their file. But because she's middle class, it's treated as a valid personal choice and she makes money from it in a national newspaper.

That was a comment on their message board- shame they have closed it to comments before we all got in there lol.

To get rid of an infestation you need to either comb only every 2-3 days for at least 3 weeks even longer to be certain. I personally prefer to comb every day because even if you don't do a really thorough job each day then you still manage to get all the ones of the right size over the 3 days.

If you don't have that sort of patience, then apply a treatment and then you should comb every 2-3 days for a week, then treat again and then comb a couple of more times to be sure.

Then to keep them clear (as someone else said) use conditoner and comb EVERY time you wash their hair (say at leat 1-2 times a week). that way you should catch any new big lice that they have caught before they lay egss.

The wet combing needs to be part of the bathtime routine. I do hava a boy with easy hair to comb though and he likes the combing so I know it is sometimes easier said than done.

YANBU, and responsible parents like you would not have to deal with this if it was taken more seriously and not seen as a taboo subject. DD had headlice when she was in nursery. I asked the staff to inform other parents, which they didn't do (unbelievable) so I told other parents at a party because i thought they needed to know. One parent told me that her son had had headlice several times, but hadn't thought to tell the nursery (.... and therefore she had helped it spread) That made me really angry. Why can't people accept that there is no shame associated with it? It's no different than catching a cold and if you can prevent it spreading, why not help others avoid it??? Beyond belief.

and more at that journalist whose kids had 1000s of lice. How can that happen??

Surely they were just not checking enough, or were not treating the parents too and were constantly reinfecting within the home. those poor kids - why is that not classed as neglect, they must have felt awful, both physically and surely emotionally, because there IS stigma attached not to having lice, which do not discriminate between class or creed, but to remaining UNTREATED and heavily infested so long. people must have been avoiding those poor children like the plague. I do not agree with boys having their heads shaved, but i do think sensible length hair cuts and well tied back are appropriate to help the problem.

Many people, whatever she says about her own frugality, would never ever be able to pay £400 to have their kids denitted by a professional. Most parents would see it as their job. And has she no shame at all, to go public with her sorry tale.

Yuk all round!

(and yes, that is my usual MN name not one just for this thread! LOL)