My daughter’s cousins invited her over for a weekend sleepover once. Their mother knew they had lice, yet allowed the sleepover. Obviously, I have neither forgiven nor forgotten this incident. Anyway…
My daughter had waist length hair. We did the Nix/comb thing a couple of times, then I cut her hair, took her to the doctor, and got a prescription for Kwell. The Kwell and combthroughs worked. I really do recommend getting a short haircut, it’s so much easier to medicate and comb out than long hair.
Teach your daughter not to share combs, brushes, hats, hair ornaments, etc. Not even with her very best friends.
Aha!!! I remembered hearing about those, only when I googled it the other day I thought it was “Robocomb”. And the only hits I got were from some person mentioning using one - no info on where to find such a device, so I assumed they were no longer on the market.
A handful of clicks and I found the manufacturer’s website. Was about to order when it occurred to me Amazon might carry it. So one is being sent via expedited shipping. Yay!!
Out here in L.A. we can hire someone to pick nits for us. We were just there on Tuesday to deal with an infestation my daughter picked up at summer camp.
In my experience the poisons don’t do much. It’s all about picking nits. And anything that loosens the nits and makes the hair slippery helps.
Lice can’t live long off the human scalp, so don’t go nuts trying to bag up all the toys and scouring the house down with bleach. Do wash the linens if that will make you feel better.
You need a nit comb. Pop in a Disney video, get yourself a glass full of white vinegar to dunk the comb in, park the kidlet in front of the TV and comb comb comb comb. The vinegar will get the eggs off. Nix only kills the adults.
Also look for black tar shampoo. That does a good job in combination with the Nix.
I’m not a parent, but I beg those of you who are to be very careful not to get the chemicals in your kids’ eyes. Remember the “most painful” thread from a few months ago? This was caused by RID. The joys of going to an inner city school…
Luckily, my son seems to have inherited my natural immunity, so neither of us have been afflicted. (Every mosquito for miles comes to find us though, go figure.)
I’ve helped my sisters battle them with the nieces and nephews way more often than I can count. The boys are easy, you can offer them a mohawk when they’re little and they’ll usually go for it, leaving you just a teensy strip to worry about. The girls are a nightmare, though, I’m so sorry it’s your turn.
One niece in particular we just could not get rid of them, despite the most rigorous re-Nixing and using the coal tar shampoo and repeated combings and bleaching everything in the house that didn’t move. Out of sheer desperation, we followed a tip I’d googled up somewhere and dyed her hair. Regular old drugstore kit, picked the color closest to her natural shade and it worked. I’m not sure how or why, or if it wasn’t even the dying but the last treatment beforehand maybe, but that’s how the 2 month saga finally ended.
Is it untrue, then, that lice prefer clean heads to dirty ones? I’d always heard that the idea of people being dirty/unwashed and thus attracting lice was not true.
Zoggie lice don’t care about states of cleanliness in hair.
Lice are an absolute pain in the ass, when I was a lot younger I had them for about a year and a half, mum tried regular lice removal lotions and combing but that didn’t work because the eggs are really tough to get rid of.
In the end what worked was the most toxic foul smelling anti lice lotion I think exists, it was like neat alcohol with a dash of sulphuric acid, the instructions were to leave it in hair for ten hours. My mum sectioned my hair into little pony tails and doused each tail one at a time. After that I put a shower cap on (highly recommended) to make sure the nits recieved no oxygen, left for the ten hours and that was what finally killed everything.
I would ignore all this about aloe vera shampoo and different herbal remedies, even with combing it’s really difficult to get all the eggs.
So yeah, find the strongest lotion you can and then put on shower cap, wash out when have to.
Also dying hair is as effective, it helped my mother when she caught them off me.
What ever you do, don’t meet your 15 year old daughter and her group of friends (AND their respective boyfriends) at the door with your hands in those handy clear gloves toting that equally handy dandy fine tooth comb, and state “your brother brought home lice, let me check your hair.”
It’ll scar her.
Although the nightly mineral oil hair masks I…err…that other girl used to keep the vermits away left my…err…her hair very very soft (even if a bottle of shampoo lasted 4 days).
My daughter got a case of head lice once, from trying on hats at an antique store while we were on vacation. One session of the Nix shampoo, a few combing sessions, and a second shampoo, and we never had the problem again. Washed the sheets a few times…nothing more to tell. No one else in the family was involved, the hair didn’t need to be cut, and no investment in oils…I guess we were lucky. And also lucky it happened during the summer, so no one else (like the school, which is very strict) ever knew.
For those of you who report months-long battles with the critters, how did you deal with the school? Our schools have rules that a child can’t come back to school until every last nit is gone…they will check you to be sure.
I’ve heard good things about the Robi-Comb…let us know how it works for you.
My niece wound up being out of school five weeks, then summer vacation started. Twice we thought we’d gotten them all and the school checker found one nit and she wasn’t allowed back. Her brother brought home her work and the teachers were very helpful, but she struggled of course.
Well, our saga started when my youngest was in pre-K. She was sent home with lice, I treated her and combed her out. Her school had a no-nits policy, plus we had to send in the cap of the bottle of treatment (or flap of the box) so they would know the child had indeed been treated.
What I wasn’t counting on was that during the infestation, my middle daughter, who has unbelievably long, thick, curly hair also caught them. But my middle daughter was being home schooled, so no school policies to worry about there.
So, I’d send the youngest back to school, the school nurse would check her and pronounce her nit-free. But it’s possible that the nurse was missing a few, because she is blond, and that makes it very hard to see them. A week later they’d be calling me to come pick her up and re-treat her. I’d also re-treat my teen at the same time.
I don’t know if youngest and teen were just passing them back and forth and re-infesting one another, if youngest was getting re-infested at school, or what. But it was a mess!
At my kids’ school , they aren’t allowed to inspect for them, or identify that a child has them - even in the most extreme cases where a child is constantly scratching like a dog, and the adult lice are visible from a short distance, they still can’t target the child and have to deal with it by sending a letter to all parents asking them all to check their children. I don’t know if this is just this particular school’s overcautious interpretation of a no-touch policy.
Not a parent but an elementary school teacher. Excuse the length of the post, but this is more or less what our parents are told about head lice:
They do not recommend any chemical treatments as the lice are becoming resistant to these. The combing sounds laborious, but it really does work.
Finally, and most importantly of all: Head lice are a very common problem, everywhere in the world. They are not a sign of poor hygiene and can affect anyone without regard to standards of cleanliness, ethnic background, hair color, hair type or age. They are not a threat to health and do not transmit diseases.
ETA: We send itchy children to the school nurse to be checked. If they have lice, the parents are called and the child is sent straight home. A letter then goes out to the parents of all students in that grade level, and to the students in grade levels where the child has siblings to say head lice have been found and everyone must check. Children must remain at home until they are clear.
Holy crap. What a change from my school - they found it at school. They would line the kids up and have the nurses go through our heads. When the nurse found one, you’d be segregated and Mom had to come pick you up.
This was, well, about 21 years ago. Jesus, how’d I get so old?
The thing was with my months-long battle that I would get my daughter certified nit-free at the local health department and then her cousins would come by again on the weekend. It took a while to figure out that it was the cousins, and not someone in school or daycare. Once we did, I had to be very ugly and said that they were not allowed to come inside the house if they came over unless I gave them each a headcheck. I hated doing that, but Og, it was disgusting. Not to mention, no parent likes putting all those chemicals on her kid’s head every frickin’ other day!
In this county, chidlren are checked when/if there is one kid found to have lice. The kids are sent home with a letter indicating either “your kid has lice and cannot come back without a nit-free letter from a doctor or health department official” or the standard “there has been an outbreak of head lice, please check your child and your family” one.
I was livid once when a school nurse sent my daughter home saying that she had lice and she didn’t though. I mean, if my kid has lice, please send her home, I don’t want her scratching and being uncomfortable, and I certainly don’t want her infecting other kids, but at least know what lice/nits look like! This moronic nurse didn’t know the difference between dry scalp flakes (my daughters head had gotten sunburnt and started peeling) and lice/nits. After my head check came up clean, I took her to the health department to see how I was missing the “adults and nits” that were supposedly in her hair – the health department lady told me there had beeen 10 or so kids that day with the same issue and confirmed what I’d already figured out – the school nurse was a moron.
On a side note – this girl my daughter used to hang out with in 6th grade had a 6 month-long bout with head lice because her step-mother basically refused to treat the kids (there were like 6 kids in the family). She never told the school about the kids having lice, either, so that she wouldn’t have to treat them. It made me ill, and I reported her to DCS and also to the school. My daughter had stopped hanging out with the kid due to other issues (the girl was…uhhmmm…yeh), so it wasn’t that my daughter was in danger of becoming infected from her, it was just child neglect. The woman ended up yanking her kids out of school mid-semester to “home-school” them because she said “they just don’t like waking up so early.” AFAIK, the kids may still have lice – I know the one girl ended up shaving her head after she moved back in with her biological mother.
