“Is it okay to send a child home with lice?”

Patricia van Liemt is a radio host, writer and mother of Maria (12) and Phaedra (9). Every Friday she writes accurate, honest, funny and above all recognizable columns about her life and motherhood.

“Is it okay to send one child home from class because she has lice?

No of course not!!!

We don’t live in the Middle Ages anymore, where you are nailed to a pillory with tar and feathers? I thought these corporal punishments were abolished. Being sent home because you have lice, I certainly put it in this category.

huge miss

Like a leper, my daughter’s girlfriend was treated by the majority of her classmates. “Nobody wanted to go near her anymore, Mom! I really thought it was so pathetic!’ I think this is pedagogically a huge miss of the school. In fact, you can traumatize a nine-year-old with this action.

“In fact, with this action you can traumatize a nine-year-old child quite a bit”

The response from the school will be that the parents have been warned in advance. Yes, that may be true, but even then you are not going to send home one child from a class with 27 accomplices. You just don’t. Shame. The return of the so-called sacrificial lamb.

Also read – Tickle, scribble, lice: this is how you can fight lice >

No solution

And what do you achieve with this? In any case, a child with a trauma. But do you really think that you as a class are lice-free? Of course not. How about all the siblings with the same symptoms, but with maybe a slightly less fanatical class parent or lice plucker? And do you know how much mom friends I often see myself giving a very small ‘lice scratch’? Many of the parents have them too! I’ve had them too.

National lice day

The only way to solve this ‘problem’ (yes, I put this in parentheses very deliberately) is to create a national lice day. Now, with a terrible war, nitrogen problems and rising energy prices, politics has something else on the agenda, so I suggest we by school tackle. Well, all children, including fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, hamsters etc. are treated…

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