After 7 years in this field, I have had to talk many parent off the ledge of insanity when it comes to home cleaning!!! I have had more parents throw pillows, hairbrushes, and even mattresses in the trash unnecessarily. When it comes down to it……Lice is a head problem, not a house problem!! These are a few things to understand when going through a lice infestation:
1) Lice absolutely cannot live without a host for over 24 hours and that time window is pushing it. After about 12 hours without a meal and they are pretty much toast. So when cleaning the home it is a good rule of thumb to think, “Has my child’s head touched this within the last 24 hours?”
2.) Your child did NOT get lice from the carpet at school, the headphones, or their napmat. They got it from their classmate!! Head lice is contracted by head to head contact. In a study conducted in Australia in 1999 involving over 3,000 children with the average lice count per student at 24. Every single soft surface was thoroughly inspected for live lice. There were literally none to be found……..that’s a big fat zero!!!
3.) Lice are not like fleas. Their eggs cannot hatch away from a host like fleas or bedbugs. You are much luckier if you have lice for this reason!!! I cannot imagine a world where lice were like fleas in this regard, luckily that is just not the case!!
4.) Lice do not burrow or penetrate surfaces. So you do not need to launder pillows or mattresses, just the cases and top sheets!
So what do you need to actually do to your house? Not much:
1.) Focus on a 24 hour window only!!! Clothes that they have worn, towels they have used, or sheets they have slept on need to be laundered or placed in the dryer for 1/2 hour on high heat.
2.) Those beloved stuffed animals?? We get asked about this all the time!!! So the chances that your child will re-infest themselves with lice from a stuffed animal are about the same as them actually doing what you ask them the first time……. so that is your call. I say let them sleep with it if it means you will get some sleep too!!
3.) Place combs and brushes in a ziploc bag in the freezer overnight.
Folks, that is literally all you NEED to do. If vacuuming the house and carseat is something that would make you sleep better at night then I say go for it!!! You don’t need to extensively clean your house or worry that lice are lurking in your bed or carpet……they just are not. Focus on getting rid of the lice on the head! That is the only place it is!!!!
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