One day, when I am
Queen, I'm going to issue a decree that all the school swimming
pools in the land will be emptied of water and filled with
drench. And then all the little children will be lined up in
single file, and closely inspected for head lice.
Those who are infected will walk the length of the swimming pool
and be dunked under sporadically, thoroughly dousing their hair.
This will happen every week, and eventually there will come a
time when this land will be free of head lice.
Nits were the bane of my life when my daughter was little. She
had long, thick hair - a veritable nit nirvana - and like every
other parent of a school-age child, we tried everything. Every
dose, every potion, every natural remedy, every electronic comb.
Years of my life were spent standing over her as she sat
stoically in a chair, painstakingly combing through her hair,
trying to find the little suckers, and then doing the same to my
own hair.
I'm scratching even as I write this, remembering the horror of
head lice. I have little sympathy for the parents who used
animal flea treatments on their children's heads - really! There
are limits.
But I'm right with those parents calling for a return to the old
days when a public health nurse would check every child for lice
and treat those who were infected.
The nurse could start at the head looking for lice, and then
work her way down the kids' bodies, checking for bruises, broken
bones and malnourishment which a significant number of children
suffer as well.
At least nits are egalitarian. They don't care what your home
address is, or what car your dad drives. They're
equal-opportunity pests. And the sooner we stop stuffing around
and pretending that it's better for the children to protect
their privacy and their parents' feelings than it is to take
them out of class and keep them away until the nits are gone,
the better.
I know a lot of parents work, so have an isolation room, where
the nitty ones can congregate until such time as the uninvited
tenants are gone. It cannot be good for children to be doused in
chemicals at least once every few months from the time they're 5
until the time they leave primary school at the age of 10. But
even the most hippie dippy of parents seems willing to set aside
their organic, herbal, natural approach to life when it comes to
dealing with nits. |
