nits, lice ---- am i overreacting?

[Mimsy2000]

my 2 year old has lice and now i do as well. i'm pregnant and thought my head itching like mad was 'hormones'. now i know why and i'm horrified.

i know lice is common in schools, but a 2 year old in nursery!?!? doesnt' that seem a bit young and does it say something bad about the nursery? i'm trying not to go off the deepend, but it makes me feel like it must be a dirty place that needs better hygeine practice. honestly, makes me want to pull him out....

Have read thread - nursery are probably lying. They will have had children with lice before.

hello smug. the point re: hygiene has been sufficiently made. thanks. and no, my son's not dirty.

Can't believe what your nursery said. Ludicrous. And very unsympathetic and irresponsible. They should be telling you what action they're going to take to help the other families who have doubtless also got them. Nits are on the rise everywhere apparently. Used to be quite rare, now a commonplace. I read they have no preference for clean or dirty hair but dislike teatree. We must have had them for ages before i twigged by which time poor ds had red marks on his scalp & he doesn't even go to a nursery but must've got it at a babygroup. It can be quite debilitating if left. I'd even seen things crawling around for a couple of weeks on his head & my pillow (ugh!) & not put two and two together. I jumped feet in the air when i finally engaged the brain. I still remember that first session picking lice with boots on out of our hair. We tried chemicals (what a nightmare), loads of combs, but the nittygritty sorted us out. Had to use it every day for at least 2 weeks though to get rid of all the eggs.

If the nursery doesn't alert other parents, I would jump up and down and insist that they do.

DD1 caught her first case at the age of 5. Best friend's mum then admitted that she had NEVER checked her child's head because she thought she would be able to see them really easily. And the child had been in nursery/school for three years by then!

Parents need to know that they have a responsibility to be on the case, and that it's nothing to be embarrassed about.

Absolutely. Forewarned is forearmed. I WISH i'd known about nits beforehand. It didn't even cross my mind. If your nursery wont if it was me i would tell them i will stand at the gate and tell parents myself. You have to catch it before all siblings, schools get it etc. With your nursery's attitude you can see why areas get nit epidemics so quickly.

Headlice like clean hair so the nursery is not a dirty place and it is not unusual to get them at Nursery. They are a nuisance but they are just a part of life.

Nitty gritty comb is OK but in my experience never got them all. Neem doesn't work. Tea tree slows them down but doesn't get rid of them (use the cheapo conditioner from Morrison's: bizarrely has more actual tea tree oil in it than the expensive ones).

The thing that actually works is Full marks solution. Non-toxic (chemically related to infacol), leave on 10 minutes, kills them all dead. Doesn't kill the eggs so you have to repeat treatment weekly for 3 weeks. But after two continuous years of bug-busting every 2-3 days with my daughter and no eradication, it saw them off, and we've only had them back twice in two years since.

yeah, i felt really crap after talking to my nursery. i thought i was doing the right thing by talking to them about it but i actually felt scolded and embarassed at the end of it.

i should add that i'm not from 'round these parts' and grew up in another country and much smaller town and never had nits growing up, which was why i didn't really have a clue as to how you got them or got rid of them. after hearing from all of you how commonplace they are, i'm even more annoyed by my nursery's response.

[beyond the lice issue, i think i have some issues with my nursery...]

need to buy tea tree shampoo. like an idiot i bought 'tea' shampoo, thinking it was tea tree, but it was indeed the nice calming cammomile tea.

I am not surprised to hear you have other issues with your nursery. As soon as you said their response alarm bells were ringing for me. Do consider doing something about them. It is dreadful that you should have been made to feel like that. I get so annoyed when services and organisations bully people, especially people who are not local. I have moved to an area where I am constantly stunned by the jaw-dropping triteness and narrowmindedness that I encounter in certain shops and within some organisations combined with an arrogance unrivalled elsewhere (and i've moved 40-odd times!). So I know how you feel. And I felt just the same as you about nits so know how shocked and silly you feel, but really dont feel bad!

thanks toddlerhip.... nice to get some outside perspective on the issue.

Is it weird to have not had nits by the age of 5 and a half (and at school)? I've never seen them on DD but sometimes wonder whether she's had it and I've missed it as I thought almost everybody got it once they were at school. Are they quite hard to spot? I keep checking and can't see anything, but could I be missing them? I'm dreading DD getting them as her hair is sooooo long and the thought of combing that lot every day... [shudder]

Also, re. the Full Marks solution - I thought I'd read that no bottle-treatments worked properly and the only surefire way to get rid of them is with a comb - that would seem to be wrong then?

Tinkjon - DD1 got her first case at about 5 and a half. They were quite easy to spot in her - very, very fine - hair. And I've been fine-toothed combing after every hairwash since nursery, so I'm 99% sure I'd have spotted them if she'd had them before.

But her best friend has very thick hair and her mum tells me that she had been doing a visual check and had never found anything. But when she did a proper, fine-toothed comb through, her head was riddled with eggs. Which gave me a pretty good idea where DD1 had got them from .......

So I'd say as long as you are checking properly - actually wet combing on a regular basis - you have probably been lucky. But if you've just been having the odd look, you might need to dig deeper!