9 - 18 Months: Horrible Health

There’s no nice way to dress this up: toddler bodies are magnets for nits and other nasties

As parenting rites of passage go, this is definitely more of the ‘eek!’ than the ‘aah!’ variety. But there’s probably no avoiding it: one day your little darling will come home from the park, nursery or toddler group with some very creepy-crawly hangers-on. And you need to know how to send them packing…

Head lice

These tiny insects like nothing more than human hair. They don’t mind if it’s dirty or clean, curly or straight — as long as they can hang around on it, sucking blood from the scalp and laying eggs on the hairshafts. The eggs then hatch into more head lice, leaving behind their cases (or ‘nits’).

Spot them Head lice are quite hard to see (they’re about as big as a sesame seed). But if your child has any, he’ll probably be scratching his head a lot, particularly behind the ears and at the nape of his neck.

Treat them

Get ‘wet combing’. Wash your child’s hair, put loads of conditioner on it and comb the lice out with a nit comb. It’s painstaking and it has to be done every three days for at least two weeks — but it works.
Alternatively, try a special head lice treatment that will kill the lice for you — ask your Boots pharmacist for advice. Don’t use any of these treatments unless you’ve already found lice on your child’s hair.

Keep them away Check the hair of everyone else in your family (by wet-combing): lice can’t jump or fly but they can crawl from the head they’re on to another one touching it.

Scabies

Scabies are teeny-weeny spidery mites that burrow under the top layer of your child’s skin and lay eggs, which then hatch into more scabies.

Spot them Your child will have intensely itchy, red bumps, often between his fingers and toes or behind his knees. The itching tends to get much worse at night.

Treat them

Ask your Boots pharmacist for an appropriate treatment and for advice on using it properly.

Keep them away Treat the whole family at the same time or you’ll re-infect each other. Hotwash bedding, towels and clothes. Wash hairbrushes and vacuum carpets and cushions. Put pillows, toys and anything else that can’t be washed into a bin bag, tie it up and leave it for two weeks, by which time the scabies mites will have died.

Threadworm

No one ever admits their child has threadworms but they’re as common — and easy to catch — as head lice. Children touch and then swallow the microscopic worm eggs without realising, and the worms hatch in their gut, wriggling out of the child’s bottom at night to lay more eggs.

Spot them Your child will have a very itchy bottom at night. And you can often see the worms (they look like little white cotton threads) wiggling in your child’s poo.