What to do if your child has head lice

Kids pick up a lot of things at school, fractions, colds, and bad words tend to be the norm. But every so often, there’s a chance your child might come home with something a little more serious, like head lice. Even though it’s not dangerous, lice is contagious and can create an itching mess in your home. We offer the basics of what to look for and how to treat the pesky situation.

Lice are tiny insects that live in human hair and feed on the blood drawn from the scalp. It’s the saliva of the lice that causes the famous itching, and depending on the sensitivity of the person infected, it might take weeks before the itching occurs. Before then, they might feel the lice moving around on their scalp, “tickling” them. If they are sensitive, the itching can develop into a rash, and if an infected person scratches too much, they may develop a bacterial infection that needs to be treated with an antibiotic prescribed by a doctor.

When you examine someone infected with head lice, you may see small yellow or brown dots on the hair strands close to the scalp. These are nits, the eggs that full grown lice leave behind. Nits stay close to the scalp where the warm temperature is ideal for hatching. You can check for nits by parting the hair and checking the scalp with magnifying glass and bright light. It’s more common to see them than full grown lice in a head of infected hair.

After a week or two, eggs hatch, and the empty shell remains stuck to the hair strand, moving with it away from the scalp as the hair continues to grow. This is when it’s most obvious that there is a head lice situation.

Your health care provider can confirm if it’s lice – if it’s a child, you should also check with their school nurse to see if lice have been a problem at the school. If it is confirmed to be head lice, you need to let your child’s school know so that they can inform other parents to check their kids too.

They don’t have wings, but head lice travel quickly from head-to-head contact. They have claws that allow them to crawl and cling to hair. They can also be spread by sharing bed sheets, clothes, brushes, hats, and combs. Since they have a lot of close contact in group settings, kids pick them up and share them easily.

A doctor may recommend one of several types of over-the-counter treatments to kill head lice and their eggs. There are shampoos, lotions, and combs that are all designed for this purpose and the time to take effect is usually quick, although there may still be itching a few days after the lice is gone. In cases where a store-bought remedy is not enough, a health care provider may prescribe an oral medication.

Just like germs and bad habits, we can’t control what our children bring home from school. But by teaching our kids about lice and telling them to be careful about sharing hats and hairbrushes we can trust them to be careful and concentrate on them bringing home something positive, like good grades.