My Daughter Keeps Getting Lice What Can I Do?
Head lice can be so frustrating and overwhelming, especially for first timers. You might find yourself combing your child’s hair for hours past bedtime, just to receive a dreaded phone call from the school nurse the following day, week or month, asking you to pick up your child. You keep her hair clean, you vacuumed the whole house, likely more than once, have laundered and bagged absolutely everything, It is easy to start believing that your daughter’s beautiful hair will forever be ridden with head lice. Those little critters just keep coming back. Let’s take a look at what might be happening and how you can treat your child for head lice successfully.
Why would a child keep getting lice?
It is important to understand that you might not necessarily be experiencing multiple cases of lice, but more so the consequences of an ineffective lice treatment. Working with clients for the last ten years, I see this happening more often than not. Frustrated parents call to schedule appointments after numerous home treatments that turn out to be unsuccessful. Many go as far as throwing out hundreds of dollars worth of personal belongings, thinking that head lice are making a home in their space. This is not true. Head lice can’t survive without a human host for more then 48 hours and therefore, the last thing they want to do is climb off their warm and cozy human. Staying on the hair and near the scalp is the only thing that is ensuring their survival. As a matter of fact, they don’t even want to transfer heads and do so unknowingly while moving around, when hair-to-hair contact occurs .
So why does my daughter keep getting lice?
There are only two explanations for this. Primarily, more often than not, a re-infestation is occurring due to the lack of elimination of all head lice and their eggs. Treating lice correctly and effectively the first time around shrinks your chances of finding them again. Most over-the-counter head lice treatments can eliminate hatched lice — nymphs and mature adults — but they do not kill the nits (eggs). Nits are removed only by a thorough comb out, using a quality stainless steel nit comb. It is essential that you sort through every hair strand on the head. A female louse cements each egg to a single hair shaft. They are firmly secured and therefore difficult to remove. If even a couple of viable eggs are missed, these will develop, hatch, and re-initiate the cycle of infestation.
How do you prevent lice re-infestation?
A less likely scenario is to become infested from a new exposure after an effective lice treatment. In order to minimize the chance of lice re-infestation, it is so important to keep hair up, if possible, in a tight bun, or braid. If hair is short, using hair spray or gel will harden the hair, making it difficult for a louse to climb on. The point is to minimize the chance of hair to hair contact. It is also so important to inform family, close friends, and teachers of your child’s positive lice case. I can understand that this might not be the best news to share.. But how else can those close to you find out that they might need to get checked for head lice. It is important to remember that not everyone itches from head lice. Actually, only approximately 50% of people find themselves scratching form head lice. Letting those close to your child know will assure that they too get checked and treated if need be, which will directly minimize the chance of your child getting reinfected.
Don’t want to be the one to share the dreaded news of head lice? Use our anonymous head lice notification email to give people a heads up.
