agonyaunt | (no subject)

(no subject)

Dear Care and Feeding,

My now second grader got lice from an outbreak at school last year, when she was in first grade. Getting rid of it was a nightmare. This week, she told me that a girl at her table has lice. When I asked how she knows, she said the girl itches her head like she has lice (okay, that could be a number of things) and that bugs have fallen from her hair onto her paper while she’s working (!!!). I contacted the teacher so she could get this poor girl help, and she said thank you, but she had already contacted the nurse and family and it was in their hands. She also said that school policy no longer requires children with lice to stay home. (She didn’t sound happy about it.)

Where do I go from here? Call the nurse and beg her to reconsider this policy? Send my kid to school in a shower cap? Ask for my kid’s seat to be moved? I don’t want to stigmatize the girl with the lice, but I REALLY don’t want to deal with lice in my household again.

—Lice Lice Baby

Dear Lice Lice Baby,

I chuckled at your signoff, which doesn’t happen often—so I have to give you props for that. However, that’s where all of the laughs end, because this is serious business.

Two days before schools shut down in 2020 due to the pandemic, both of my daughters’ thick, curly hair were filled with lice. I tried everything to get it under control on my own, but nothing was working. Then I called “lice professionals” and they weren’t seeing anyone because they were deathly afraid of COVID. Finally I found a woman who was willing to make a house call to treat my girls’ hair as long as we did it in my backyard and everyone was masked. After four hours of treatment, an absurd amount of money that I paid to the specialist, and the most laundry I’ve ever completed in a 24-hour span, it was all over.

I’m sharing this story because to call that ordeal a “nightmare” would be the understatement of the century and I would do everything humanly possible to ensure I never have to relive it again. Talking to the nurse is fine, but you’re not going to change a school policy overnight. A shower cap at school is pretty extreme and would bring unwanted attention to your daughter. Now I am not a licensed professional like the lice specialist who rescued our family, but I’ll give you the information I have based on her advice, which I followed. Ensure your daughter’s hair is styled in a tight bun at school, she washes her hands often, she hops in the shower directly after school, and her clothes are thrown directly into the laundry each day, for starters. As far as controlling her school environment, you should insist at the bare minimum that your daughter’s seat is moved to another part of the room. Kids change their seats in school all of the time, so I doubt the girl with lice would know it’s because of her. (The irony isn’t lost on me that a dude who has chosen to be bald for the past twenty years is giving anyone advice about lice, but here we are.)

Last, but certainly not least—please ensure that your daughter doesn’t spread rumors about this child. I know that should go without saying and I’m sure you have that part covered, but it would be irresponsible of me not to bring it up. I’m sure she feels bad enough as it is, and it would be horrible if she was bullied as well.

This too will pass, but you’re wise to do whatever it takes to make sure it passes as painlessly as possible.

https://slate.com/human-interest/2022/11/learning-trust-children-cell-phones-privacy.html

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This advice is excessive, and unnecessarily stigmatizing.

LW's daughter should keep her hair tied back when in school. Buns or cornrows are a good idea. If she has short hair, a headband will help.

However, lice are not under any circumstance associated with cleanliness. Also, you can see them. It is not necessary to wash your hands more than normal. It is not necessary to shower as soon as she comes home from school, nor is it helpful - if you have lice and wash your hair, all that happens is your lice are very clean and happy. Evidence suggests that they may actually prefer clean hair over dirty hair, not that it really matters in the long run. It is not necessary or helpful to wash clothes every day, immediately after getting home from school - lice do not live on clothes. They actually can't live more than three days off the human head, and certainly cannot reproduce off the human head, so at most, all you have to do is toss the clothing in the laundry pile and make sure nobody fishes anything out of there before it's been washed.

LW's daughter's classmate is not dirty. Or, if she is, that's a separate issue from the lice.

As far as controlling her school environment, you should insist at the bare minimum that your daughter’s seat is moved to another part of the room. Kids change their seats in school all of the time, so I doubt the girl with lice would know it’s because of her.

Well, she certainly will when ALL her classmates have their seats changed, one by one. Or is this advice "offer some other kid up to the lice"?

Lice can't jump heads either. LW's daughter should be advised not to put her head next to any other child's head, whispering and the like.

That said, there is one surefire way to get rid of lice, and that's to shave the head. If you're unwilling to do that, the next best thing is to comb daily with a fine tooth comb, section by tiny section, carefully removing each bug and nit you find, and aiming a hair dryer at each section for 30 seconds. The hair dryer doesn't need to be on high heat - you want to dry the bugs out, not bake your child.

If that also doesn't work, then you can do the following, and this worked when we had my niece and her best friend persistently passing the same case of lice back and forth between households. (We got all kids from both families at the same time.)

Buy a large container of unscented (trust me) lotion or conditioner, and also a bottle of benzyl alcohol. Mix them at a rate of one tablespoon of alcohol to one cup of lotion/conditioner. The benzyl alcohol will eat through plastic, though slowly, so buy a new set of measuring cups and mixing bowls for this purpose. Put on the head, leave there 30 minutes, wash off and comb. Repeat in a week, and again in another week.

This is effectively prescription-strength lice shampoo, and they haven't, to my knowledge, evolved a resistance against it yet. If you actually got a prescription it'd cost $$$$$ and this is much cheaper. Useful if you don't want to shave your child's head and their hair texture does not make intensive fine-tooth combing feasible.

Oh, and some people in the comments there are blithely repeating the "Black people don't get lice" myth.

Head lice predate the human expansion out of Africa, and yes, Black people can get lice. Yes, this is true no matter what your hair texture is.

If it even is the case that African-American children are less likely to get lice than other American children (and I'm really not sure that this is true) then odds are good that this can be chalked up to cultural reasons rather than innate, biological ones - their parents are just more likely to favor hairstyles that are not conducive to the spread of lice.

But everybody can get lice.

When we were discussing lice in funeral studies, one of the studies who had been a cosmetology student and came back for a different career mentioned that one of the reasons that black people don't appear to get lice as often as white people is 1) hair styles and the culture of community hair styling and 2) hair product used in black hair tends to discourage lice due to a difference in common textures. The more common white people don't use the same kind of product (I know when I use the deep conditioning stuff out of the 'ethnic hair care' aisle, it's completely different {works amazingly on my hair after the prescription stuff I have to use, though}) and that has a big difference as well.

Lice can't jump heads either. LW's daughter should be advised not to put her head next to any other child's head, whispering and the like

I once caught lice as an adult (in the 1990s), and the only possible vector was catching the bus... I was single, living alone, and not getting within arms-reach of anyone else except when catching the bus.

The top letter in this column, btw, involves cell phone monitoring. I suppose you *can* monitor your 17 year old's phone, but you probably shouldn't unless you have some particular concern. In a matter of months, your child will be a legal adult, and unless you want them to immediately stop listening to you on their birthday or, at most, the day of their high school graduation, then you should probably begin at least *pretending* that you trust them to act like the adult they're about to be.

I will admit. I recently texted one of my nieces who is a senior and is 17. I got a text that night from my sister saying "I see you are texting with (niece) about (thing)" and I was surprised. I mean I get monitoring the 14 yr old who JUST got a phone this fall. But that the 17 yr old who is going to college soon is having their texts read by their mom. (meanwhile I will admit that my other sister gives her kids telephones at 10 and doesn't monitor them at all... seems suss. like there has to be a middle ground, right???)

When my daughter had lice, we were advised to use a lot of conditioner on her hair to make it easier to combine and also because the lice apparently can't move through it. I don't know if this is true, and it still took a lot of combing, but it got rid of them.

Lice aren't going to be on her hands, and showering won't work at all. Showering doesn't even shift 'em.

If she gets the lice, you can start with a lice treatment to firebomb them and kill anything that's already there. Then to control the problem of continued transmission, you need to go low-tech. Conditioner, fine-toothed comb, set aside time for it every other day. Comb, comb, comb. Work thoroughly, sectioning the hair if possible, and go close to the roots.

Wear hair in a tight plait or another way of controlling it. Advise her on how lice spread, but understand that she isn't in control of when someone will randomly veer toward her or whatever.

Be prepared to keep on with the conditioner, fine-toothed comb, and the regular checks. For me with thick, slightly curly, long hair (though you mostly need to worry about hair close to the scalp), it was an hour-long process. My sister's turn was slightly faster, as her hair is finer.

Also, parent, check your own hair (and any siblings, and Dad's).

Guessing from the usage of the word "plait", but you should know that Europe and the UK have gone a very different route from the USA when it comes to lice treatments. Most commonly, treatments across the pond are more focused on limiting spread than actually killing the bugs. Less use of pesticides.

It's not a school policy, it's a district or state policy, so talking to the nurse won't do anything because they can't change it. (Actually, I just looked it up; it's the CDC policy).

Another hit from the "Oh, well, whaddaya gonna do [shrug emoji]" CDC.

A little internet searching turns up:

The CDC suggests treating lice but not otherwise inhibiting attendance: https://www.cdc.gov/parasites/lice/head/parents.html and https://www.cdc.gov/parasites/lice/head/schools.html

National Association of School Nurses suggests no attendance changes, no classroom screening, and no broad notifications: https://www.nasn.org/nasn-resources/professional-practice-documents/position-statements/ps-head-lice

I can anecdata the problem of misdiagnosing nits: when the Fanlet was in preschool we picked her up one day and one of the teachers took me aside and said they'd found nits in her hair that afternoon. We got home, and I searched and searched her scalp, and found nothing. Then, after dinner, I was doing dishes, including the lunch I had packed for her that day. She'd had a quinoa salad. Cooked quinoa apparently looks like lice nits to the casual observer, and 3 year olds are not necessarily the most fastidious of eaters.

Everyone else here has already given good advice.

I'm here to complain about White People who don't know what protective hairstyles are and how to use them (and in general WP not knowing how to use fucking conditioner to best effect). I am White People from a long line of White People. More people need to know how to braid and what the correct hair tools are for their hair.

*fistbump*

On top of everything else, the hyperbole about his nit treatment experience during Covid is really rubbing me the wrong way.

Yeah, though it's not clear if that's his own hyperbole or if this one woman really oversold how much you have to do about lice.

I tend to think it's the latter, so she could charge "an absurd amount of money".

Yeah, I was all ready for it to be the other way around, that it was a nothingburger compared to worrying about Covid.

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