Mumsnet - How to Blitz Nits (and other Nasties): A witty yet practical guide to defeating the ten most common childhood ailments

(Please leave your decorousness at the door)

Raising children, it turns out, is basically an extreme form of pest control. Pre-children, you probably imagined that a goodly portion of parenthood would involve teaching them to listen to the sea in a shell, sewing tiny ladybird buttons onto pinafore dresses and stroking warm little backs bundled up in sleeping bags in the semi-dark. How wrong we all were.

Seeing your offspring safely through from birth to Isnt it time you got your own place now, sweetheart? can, in practice, take on the character of a dogged slog through one horror after another, from fungus to phobia, parasite to plague, excretion to emesis. In any given week, if they havent succumbed to a vomiting bug, the chances are theyll have picked up nits or threadworms. When you finally manage to see off the wart thats been squatting on their hand for a year, youll notice a lovely patch of ringworm blooming on the other arm. And thats before you take into account the beasties your child will invite in all of their own accord, from dragons under the bed invading their mind and your sleep to Lego lightsabers inserted deftly up the nostril.

In short, your childs body can feel like a battleground of nasty little pests, particularly during the nursery and school years, when regiments of lice, threadworms, common colds and tummy bugs keep up a constant vigil, seeking out the small, the weak, the long of hair and the sucky of thumb to make good their entrance. Welcome to the jungle.

Face down your foe

Every parent will of course have their own particular nemesis the childhood nasty they dread above all others. There are those who take a sanguine approach to parasites such as head lice and threadworms, while others, when faced with the same, seriously consider moving their child into the shed and leaving them provisions in a vinegar stone, plague-village-style. As one Mumsnetter told her talk board comrades:

I DETEST parasites of any sort. Apparently more than 70% of living things on the earth are actually parasites. Nice huh?

SamuelWestsMistress

Some of us, meanwhile, feel light-headed at the thought of having to retrieve a snot-covered mouldy pea from inside a nostril, while others take it in their stride, as this traumatised soul testified:

One of the most disgusting things I have ever seen was a toddler in a pram at the traffic lights who did a massive snot sneeze. His mum just leaned forward and slurped all the snot up; she didnt even spit it out. My mum and I just stood there open-mouthed. We missed the green man and everything. My mum called weakly after her, I had a tissue.

Notso

Considering carefully which particular horror you dread most, however, will get us nowhere. When alls said and done, its about context:

Which is worse, nits or threadworms? Answer: whichever one is in YOUR house RIGHT NOW.

Bogeyface

Wise words indeed. Its time to buckle up, knuckle down, and get your hands dirty.

Bring out the big guns (or large gins)

Of course, some fights are harder-won than others. Should you be exceedingly unlucky, you may find yourself battling a war on two fronts, in which more than one nasty needs nixing at once:

It was when we all had threadworms and nits at the same time that I knew I had truly arrived as a parent.

Foxinsocks

Solutions there may be to all manner of pest and plague, but theres a time and a place, too, for drowning your sorrows in a large drink, or six cubic feet of chocolate. If youve given everything a go and your child and home are still infested with whichever nightmare being you were seeking to evict, well, theres succour to be found in drowning your sorrows, and comfort to be taken from the knowledge that someone, somewhere, has had it worse than you and lived to tell the tale. A moment of respectful silence, please, for this poor Mumsnetter and her dramatic brush with bodily fluids.

I turn off the tap to the bath that I am filling for us to share. THUD. A turd the size of a corn on the cob drops from his tiny peach of a bum onto my landing carpet... I wrestle the monster into the toilet and clean my son up.

Son: Ive done another poo in my bedroom. There is diarrhoea smeared all over his bedroom carpet. I clean it up, pop him in the bath, and get in myself. Have just wet my hair with a cup when my son smiles and announces he has done a big wee in the bath and then... vomits on me. TWICE.

So Im sitting with piss dripping from my hair, raisins stuck to my tits and yoghurt floating around me. I wearily get up, put on the shower and pull out the plug. Im shoving bits of food down the plug hole with my big toe while cleaning us both off...

Next day, I found a five pound note on the ground. Normally Id ask around in case anyone had dropped it but I shoved it into my pocket in the firm belief that it had been sent down from God himself as if to say, Go on girl, treat yourself. I sent you all kinds of crap yesterday, get yourself something nice.

Donbean

Its true that you have to take your breaks where you can find them as a parent. But while succour and support have their place, what moments like these call for are the quick wits and clear thinking of those who have been there before.

Call in the cavalry

Unfortunately, no ones going to bail you out of any of these battles. You were press-ganged unknowingly the day that thin blue line appeared, and now youre foot soldier, firefighter and Chief of Defence Staff rolled into one.

Thats the bad news. The good news is that theres help and advice at hand from an army of individuals whove been in the same boat. Since the dawn of time, parents have been disinfecting riddled hair, scraping bodily fluids off clothes and turfing out monsters, both real and imaginary, from their homes. And in more modern times, theyve very kindly shared their solutions on Mumsnet.

In this book, weve addressed ten of the most common childhood nasties and scoured the Mumsnet talk boards (a.k.a. the coalface) for the simplest, most ingenious and amusing cures. Some come with an NHS seal of approval, others are very definitely from the old wives school of medicine (in fact, many are entirely without medical or scientific recommendation, so we do advise you to approach them with caution and entirely at your own risk) but crucially, all of them have worked for someone out there.

Grit your teeth, gird your loins and get the freezer jacket on the wine bottle. This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it might just be the end of the beginning... Until the next attack.