The first time my son came home with head lice he was two and attending day care three days a week. I was at home with a newborn baby, recovering from a caesarean. As day care informed us he’d have to be clear of the lice before he could return, and he was not exactly in little-angel mode following the birth of his sister, we made a frantic trip to the chemist to buy the most reliable treatment we could find.
At home, he screamed and wailed as we doused his poor little head in a bitter-smelling chemical concoction before distracting him with cartoons for half an hour as we waited for it to work. I consulted Google on what else to do before washing all his – and our – bedding and night wear in hot water to kill any little blighters that may have left the host.
A few days later, day care sent him home again. The dreaded lice had returned. We explained we’d treated him, but they shrugged and said it obviously hadn’t worked. Back to the chemicals, back to the screaming.
The next day my sister arrived from Melbourne to help me with the baby. By this time, I could feel little creepy critters crawling around my ears and the nape of my neck. My sister checked my hair and confirmed an infestation. Tearful and hormonal, I told her we had the chemicals – could she treat me while I fed the baby?
Being a veteran of numerous lice infestations by virtue of having older children, she was horrified. “That stuff doesn’t work,” she said. “You need to buy a metal fine-tooth nit comb and cheap white conditioner and comb it all through, then repeat it in a few days.”
“What about washing all the bedding in hot water?”
She laughed. “Not necessary. Why didn’t you call me first?”
To be honest, we’d barely even heard about head lice, particularly not in a child so young. Neither of us remembered anyone getting it when we were at school, so why was it so prevalent now?
According to the experts, a big part of the reason is that head lice have become resistant to most of the chemicals used to treat them. One of the most common insecticides, permethrin, was almost 100 per cent effective when it was introduced in the mid-’80s; now the opposite is true. The thing is, head lice are annoying, but they will not harm our kids, so it’s no surprise that not a lot of resources are being funnelled into solving the head-lice problem.
The conditioner-and-comb method was a little laborious, but it certainly worked, so it’s the method I always turned to when one of the kids contracted head lice during their subsequent school years. My son only caught it one more time but my daughter, who has very long hair, went through a stage in about Years Two and Three of having it frequently.
Oddly, she rarely felt the little critters – to the extent that one day we checked her, and she was literally crawling with lice – so don’t rely on your child to always raise the alarm or start scratching. Sometimes head lice seem to travel around a group of friends like wildfire; other times it’s like they appear from nowhere. One positive flow-on from its ubiquity is that some of the stigma of having lice has disappeared – there’s no point in teasing a kid with lice when you are just as likely to have it yourself!
Happily, after several years of using the conditioner-and-comb method, a friend told me of another ‘natural’ way to eliminate lice that was a lot less hard work. This involved using a tea tree-based shampoo that you lather in, then leave on the head for 15 minutes beneath a shower cap (which feels rather like a fumigation process). Rinse it off and you’re done until the required repeat treatment. It felt too good to be true, but it worked. There are other products in the range, including a daily preventative spray, but the shampoo did the trick in our family.
Now we’ve been lice-free for more than a year and the kids are of high school age. The lice comb is still in the cupboard. You never know when you might need it…
COMB ALONE – THE NATURAL WAY TO BEAT THE BAD GUYS
If you’re not keen on using any type of chemicals on your child’s scalp, the conditioner-and-comb method is effective and safe, if a little laborious for long hair. I used to put my daughter in front of a DVD to distract her, wrap a towel around her shoulders and comb away.
It involves saturating the hair with a cheap, light-coloured conditioner, which stuns the lice so they are immobilised.
Using a special lice comb, such as the metal Lice Breaker (from chemists), you systematically comb through the hair to remove the lice. Pay special attention to behind the ears and the nape of the neck.
The easiest thing to do is to regularly clean the comb on pieces of kitchen towel, which also shows you how many lice you are removing.
The important part is to repeat the treatment a week later as any remaining eggs (nits) will have hatched within this timeframe (nits are more difficult to remove as they adhere to the hair shaft).
For an natural alternative to head lice removal, check out the Ego Moov Head Lice range here.
