How to Prevent Back to School Cooties — I love back-to-school time. I simply adore it! There is something about shopping for school supplies and watching the kiddos gear up for a fresh new year that is therapeutic. I HATE that it also means close indoor quarters which leads to sniffles and other bugs.
So, how do you keep the kids healthy without pressure washing them in the driveway each afternoon? Here are a few tips to give your kids the extra edge this year when it comes to avoiding germs and cooties:
How to Prevent Back to School Cooties
Start with healthy foods. Provide a healthy breakfast {or ingredients for one if you have older kids} and pack healthy lunches. It’s like pumping them full of premium unleaded. They will run better.
Establish and enforce reasonable bedtimes. Sleep is important. Plain and simple. There are a million activities after school that keep kids up too late. Try, if possible, to prioritize sleep.
Encourage kids to wash hands regularly. A lot of classrooms just give the kids a pump of hand sanitizer in order to keep on schedule. It’s okay to request that your child be allowed to go wash their hands instead.
The way I see it, you aren’t there to make friends, you are there to be your child’s advocate.
A lot of classes have “community” pencils, crayons, etc. I ALWAYS provided to the community pool, as requested in the school supply list, but I also sent my kids with their own pencils, etc. It only takes about a minute in a grade school classroom to see why kids get sick.
They chew on their pencils, wipe their noses with their hands, and in general, put their bodily fluids all over everything. It is the nature of the age group, so no reason to have your kid grabbing into the germ pool.
Encourage kids NOT to share lunches. My kids went to a school that didn’t allow lunch sharing, so I didn’t really have to do much {don’t get me wrong, I am sure some under-the-table deals were made}. 😉
Send a water bottle instead of relying on the drinking fountain. Most schools allow children to have water bottles at their desk now anyway. It probably make the teacher’s life so much easier than having individual kids interrupt the lesson to ask to get a drink.
Studies have shown time and time again that school drinking fountains harbor more bacteria and germs than the toilet seats {gross}, so eliminating the need for your kiddo to stick their face on the drinking fountain seems like a no-brainer.
Those are my tips on how to prevent back to school cooties. Do you have any to add to the list? Do tell!
~Mavis
Mona R McGinnis says
Regular cleaning of the water bottles. Stay home when sick. Use tissue & sanitize or wash after.
As much as back to school can be fun for kids & a relief to parents, I feel sorry for those students returning to school. Give me summer break any day.
Susan says
During the worst of flu/cold season, my mom taped a ribbon on my pencil and I wore it around my neck. That prevented other kids and teachers from picking up my pencil and using it and transferring germs. I got a bit of guff for being different but it worked really well. As an adult, I used the same method when I was a math tutor. I never caught anything from my students.
Mel says
I run high-powered HEPA filters in all the rooms my students are in. Hospitals use them to clean germs out of the air, and the units we use clean all of the air in the rooms 15 times an hour.
KC says
Yep! HEPA filtering is really useful! (and you can make corsi-rosenthal cubes for <$100/each if you don't mind a 20"x20" duct-taped-together cube as a decor element; they have stunningly good filtration levels and CFM)
There was a smallish (71 student) school in Australia that didn't have any in-school transmission during the Omicron wave – parents got together in the building with a smoke machine and CO2 detectors, and set up ventilation and filtration before students went back to class during Omicron, and while occasional students and teachers got omicron at intervals, no one apparently got it from anyone else at school! https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-04-01/brisbane-school-no-covid-omicron-outbreaks-term-1/100956850
(and I'm thinking "it's been… how long… and I haven't thought of just using a *smoke machine* to see where air is going, in practice, and how fast a filter is cleaning up a room?")
Saliva-transmitted diseases [team-sports waterbottle-sharing mono, anyone?] and head lice [ooof] are also good to take measures against, too.
But air filtration knocks so many contagious diseases down, *plus* giving the kids with seasonal allergies a bit of a break from pollen. 🙂 (… and while smoke shortens the lifespan of filters – they fill up eventually – HEPA filters and corsi-rosenthal cubes are *also* really good against wildfire smoke. Not as good as, say, fixing things so that "wildfire smoke season" stops being a thing again, but a useful patch given where we are now.)
Mel says
Yes, I’ve heard of the Corsi Rosenthal boxes. Very cool.
J in OH-IO says
Mel –
Do you happen to know what brand you have or do you have a link to the HEPA filters? After the wild fires in Canada came into our state I am now thinking maybe we should have one for our home. Thanks!
Mel says
We use a couple brands. One is Germ Guardian I believe. The brand is less important than looking at the CADR for each unit to make sure it’s powerful enough for the space you’re in. Here’s a calculator that may help: https://reviewsofairpurifiers.com/cadr-calculator/
You can use multiple units in a larger space if you can’t find a unit powerful enough.
J in OH-IO says
Thank you!
Linda Sand says
Don’t share hats, combs, hair ribbons, etc. If the seat on the bus is high enough that your head hits, do wear a hat or scarf while riding. Treating for head lice is NOT something you want to have to do.
Linda Practical Parsimony says
My g-daughter had very long and full hair. She kept getting lice at school. So, my daughter put her child’s hair in braids to prevent it from collecting lice when the little girls put their heads together, as little girls will do.
Judith DeWitt says
I read an article once which purported that children who swim in ocean water on a regular basis don’t get head lice. A solution of sea salt and warm water as a rinse following a shampoo was suggested as a means of preventing head lice. Seemed simple and logical, but my daughter was already grown, so I never got to use this method of prevention.
KCB says
When I was in school, we always made Cootie Catchers. They seemed to work pretty well.