I had a call into my Green Goddess hour on my radio show the other day about natural ways to get rid of nits.
It can seem like a never-ending battle trying to keep your child’s hair free of head lice during the school year. As soon as you think you have all your kids nit-free, one of them starts scratching, then the others join in.
Some parents will turn to chemical preparations from the chemist, but some of these may no longer work if the head lice have built up resistance.
Here are some tried and true natural methods I have found that work well:
• Commit to the comb. I would enthusiastically line my kids up every night and comb their hair free of nits, and then after about six days, get tired of it. Of course, we all know you need to do it for 14 days straight to be sure you get all the hatched eggs. So do it during the news or your favourite family TV programme. Set up a good light, have a glass of water next to you to dump the nits in and start at the sides, nape of the neck and hairline, working your way in. Do not forget that all the nits are drowning in the glass of water and have a drink, as I once did!
• Every second night, get your child to wash their hair and then smother it in conditioner, leaving it on for 20 minutes and then start combing. The conditioner stuns the lice temporarily and makes it easier to catch them with a comb.
• Choose a good comb. I recommend the steel ones.
• Smothering your child’s head in Vaseline overnight will suffocate some but not all the nits. So do this at the start of the treatment and allow a good session in the morning to wash it all out. Squeezing in some baby oil can help get the Vaseline out or use olive oil or mayonnaise.
• Treat the whole house at the same time, otherwise you’ll re-infest each other.
• On day one of the treatment, take all linen, including pillow cases and wash in hot water. Do this again seven days later.
• Wash towels. Each towel used to dry the head needs to be washed in hot water.
• Make your own tea tree shampoo and conditioner by buying any budget brand from the supermarket and dropping tea tree oil into the bottles. I use about 10 drops per small bottle. Your children need to use this from now on. It won’t kill an infestation but it will prevent another one occurring.
Top tip
Wash teddy and any other soft toy who lives in your child’s bed when you do their linen. For the purposes of nit elimination, it may pay to limit your children to one favourite toy for the next two weeks, and make sure it is one that will withstand the hot wash cycle in your washing machine.
