Many schools have camps where children can spend time away from home and school in another environment for a few days. If your child is going to camp, they will likely have a great time, but they may bring some things home with them that you do not want to deal with, including head lice. Below are ways you can check for lice, as well as what you can do if you find them on your child's scalp.
How Your Child Can Get Lice
If your child has head to head contact with someone that has head lice, the lice can jump over to their scalp. This could be while they are sleeping, while playing a game, etc. You should understand that lice do not jump from one head to another while children are simply around each other. It has to be direct head to head contact.
How to Look for Lice
Lice can also be found in the eyebrows and even the eyelashes in some cases. Their main diet is blood and your child will feel them moving around, which is why their scalp itches.
If your child comes home constantly scratching their head, sit them down and go through their hair, paying close attention to the hair close to the scalp, their neckline, and behind their ears. The best way to do this is by using a nit comb, sometimes called a lice comb.
Get a flashlight and part your child's hair in very small sections to look for lice. Look on the scalp and the hair strands. You will see very tiny, brown seeds attached to the strands of their hair and may even see them crawling around on their scalp if they have lice.
How to Remove Lice
Use the nit comb to remove the lice out in very small sections of hair at a time. As you see lice on the combs, dip the comb in a bowl of hot water to remove them. This will take a lot of time, and when you are finished, go over your child's head again to ensure you got all of them out.
There are lice kits you can purchase at a pharmacy. These kits contain the nit comb as well as a special type of shampoo that will kill the nits.
If your child has lice, you should thoroughly vacuum your home, and wash their pillow cases and sheets in as hot of water as they can be washed.
Share14 October 2016
When my daughter began having academic problems in school and acting out, I knew that something wasn’t right. Her teachers wanted me to put her on ADD medications, but I didn’t think that that was the right course for us. I had serious doubts that ADD was what was causing her problems. I took her to several different specialists before discovering that her issues in school were actually do to a visual processing problem. The doctor recommended vision therapy, not medication, to help correct the problem and get her back on track. The exercises are really starting to pay off, and she’s showing great improvement.
