What Parents Say: Head Lice Myths Prevail

And then there is this. “Parenting tip: If your kid ever gets lice, make sure you send them to the local orphanage with the best YELP reviews.”

Here’s another favorite. “School sent a note home with my 5yo that someone had lice in his class. In unrelated news, I broke out in hives & burned all our belongings.”

Let’s try one more. “Four out of five moms agree that lice will give you a nervous breakdown. And even the fifth mom is just pretending to hold it together.”

Basically, all 47 tweets express surprise, outrage, frustration, and stress. It’s a shame because lice just aren’t that hard to beat anymore. You can see from the peoples’ reactions that myths about head lice prevail.

For example, you really don’t need to fill garbage bags with stuffed animals and keep them in the garage or attic for weeks. Lice can’t live on stuffed animals; they’ll die within a day. And you don’t have to send your children away; they didn’t do anything wrong. Neither did the parents. The stigma that lice have something to do with hygiene is dying, but dying very slowly.

One of the reasons that lice are so frustrating for parents is that the traditional medications used to treat them no longer work because of a genetic mutation in lice that have made them resistant to the insecticide used in traditional medications, dubbing this new strain of critters “super lice.” The latest study of “super lice” found that 98 percent of lice in 48 states are now immune to pyrethroids, the class of insecticide used in over-the-counter lice products. So, in addition to the stress of finding bugs in their children’s hair, parents spend weeks or months in a futile battle using drugstore lice products.

While no one is likely to be pleased when their child has head lice, they no longer have to freak out.