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.
no subject
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.