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Head Lice:

One of the most common problems a parent will face (especially with kids in school or daycare) is that their child will get head lice. Head lice are small bugs that live in hair (think fleas for humans) and can easily go from one person to the next by sharing a hair brush or simply standing really close to someone who has them. They cause the scalp to itch, and the only sign a parent may have that their child has lice is that they are scratching their head a lot.

Once the lice have gotten into the hair, they lay eggs on the hair shaft that stick to the hair. These then have to be individually physically removed. This means that the longer your child has them, the harder it will be to get rid of.
There are many things that can make the elimination of these bugs a very difficult task. No matter what you may do to get rid of them, your child is likely going to a school where it is being passed around, which means after you eliminate the problem, it may very well come right back. Another difficulty is that it is so easily passed around without anyone knowing: by the time you have realized that your child has it, they may have passed it to every member of your family.
There are several ways to try to get rid of head lice. The first option is to buy over-the-counter medicine that kills them when shampooed in the hair. After doing this, you have to use a very fine-tooth comb to try to get all the eggs out of the hair. Sometimes, a strain of lice will become immune to this type of shampoo.

When you have used it a few times (following the directions for amount, frequency and process) and it doesn't seem to be working, you can take your child to the doctor and get a prescription for a stronger version of this same shampoo. While this isn't a fun thing to have to do, these prescription shampoos work much better than the over-the-counter versions.

If your child has acquired head lice, and you are trying to get rid of it, there are a few tips that can help you be much more successful:

• Treat everyone in the family—even if they don't have them. Having that medicated shampoo put in their hair before ever getting them can work as a preventative measure.

• Follow directions—when you buy medicine to get rid of them, you will want to follow the directions completely. If it says to repeat the treatment in a week (and a lot of them do say something like this), then you should definitely do it. Many of them say this because the eggs are not killed by the medication, meaning that if you don’t follow directions and shampoo again in a week, you will be right back where you started.

• Take care of linens—many people don't think about this part, but it is important to wash all pillows and blankets in the house. While there may be none there, it is better to go ahead and wash them just in case. It is much better to wash a few linens rather than have to go through the whole treatment process over and over again because you didn't.

• Wash out all brushes—for the time that your child is being treated, you will want them to use a brush that no one else uses, and you will want it to be a different one that the one they were using before you found out about the lice. You will also want to wash all brushes in the house in extremely hot water with some type of disinfectant cleaner. That, or buy new brushes.

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