Sure they do. My middle daughter was in 4th grade when she started getting horrible headaches. It took our pediatrician and a neuro-ophthalmologist to figure out her blood sugar was low during the day. We sent her to school with extra snacks and juice, and that solved the problem.
Thanks all. Really, I’ve gotten headaches that just won’t go away sometimes, even if I take a painkiller or a nap. And I imagine if that happened to a child, they’d just go nuts. Then I realized I’d never had them as a kid, we’d take aspirins for fever (we didn’t know about Reye’s syndrome back then,) but I never had to alleviate a headache, or body ache with an analgesic, until I was older.
Common causes of headaches:
“Tension” headache
Medication overuse headache*
Caffeine withdrawal headache
Kids don’t really get those.
Adults would also have cluster headaches, neck arthritis, trigeminal neuralgia and temporal arteritis as possible causes of headaches. Kids- less so.
See your doctor about recurrent headaches- they can take a full history, run appropriate tests and decide if there is any cause for alarm.
*Using a painkiller like ibuprofen or paracetamol/acetominophen most days for as little as 2 weeks can actually cause headaches.
You stop all painkillers, the headaches get worse, and then, hopefully, they get better.
A lot of children get headaches. My migraines with aura started when I was 4. I’ve had tension headaches (and back and neck pain issues) as long as I can remember too.
Oh! I was talking about this with some friends last month, so I really want to participate, but I’ve forgotten most of what they said. It was something along the lines of this: as we get older, our immune system gets more and more developed, so that when something harmful enters our body, our immune response is more severe as we age. That’s why a cold is far more miserable as a grown up than it was when we were a kid. If the headaches you get normally accompany a sickness or fever, this could be why.
Unless you’re just referring to stress headaches. In that case, you probably just get more stressed now than you did back then. (As a point of reference, I got a headache every time I watched TV as a child. I believe that was because of eye strain, though, and got better when I was prescribed glasses at 8 years old.)
I had some really gnarly headaches as a kid. I remember being VERY upset that the aspiring didn’t work instantaneously.
When I got braces at age 15, the orthodontist said my upper jaw had quit growing when I was about six years old, and that was probably the cause of the headaches. I wore a palatal expander for about nine months, which gradually widened the palate and gave my teeth room to move into place. Those sorts of headaches ended after that.
Now I get migraines. Yayyy. :-/
When I was a kid, gave both my parents headaches. (have been told)
I used to get tension headaches when I was young because I was growing up in a dysfunctional, constant-crisis sort of home environment. I also got nausea sometimes when things were really bad.
I had undiagnosed allergies and got a lot of sinus headaches from allergic reactions. My dad used to scold me because “I always had a cold.” Like it was my fault I had a cold. One day when I was in my early 20s, I asked him, “Did it ever occur to you guys to have me checked for allergies?” Dad said, “No, why? Do you have allergies?”
Yeah. At one point, I was having headaches just about every day (when I was being sexually abused as a teen). My stepmom’s brilliant response to this was not to have me examined by a medical professional, but to hide the Tylenol because she thought I was becoming addicted and she thought she needed to nip that right in the bud.
I have no words for the rage I felt when I asked her where the Tylenol was and she informed me that I would have to suck it up and suffer through my headaches. I think she thought they were all in my head. Pun not really intended. 
I ended up stopping at the drugstore on my way to school one morning and used my babysitting money to purchase my own personal stash of Tylenol, which I kept in my purse and in my locker at school.