How to Keep Your Child Safe from Cold and Flu

How to Keep Your Child Safe from Cold and Flu

Parents hate it when their children get sick. The children become cranky, weak and sad. They miss out on important things such as school, time with family and other social obligations. As a parent, you get worried and have to interrupt your normal day to take care of your child’s needs. It is, therefore, much better to make sure that your children are protected from this unfortunate situation. Here are a few tips on how to keep them safe from colds and flu.

Keep Your Hands Clean

One of the most effective ways of keeping your children and family members safe from flu and cold viruses is to ensure that they always keep their hands clean. It is important that you teach your children, from a very early age, how to properly wash their hands.

Washing hands is not just a matter of getting your hands wet. Use warm water and soap to gently, but thoroughly scrub the palm, between the fingers, back of the hand and even under the nails for approximately 20 seconds.  A fun way of helping your children remember, how to wash hands effectively, is by making them sing “Happy Birthday” twice while they scrub their hands before rinsing.

Make sure that they know they need to wash their hands before eating, after using the loo, after handling dirt or pets and after coughing. Your child’s care givers and sitters also need to be taught that they need to keep their hands clean too, for the child’s sake.

Disinfect Your Child’s Environment

Children can be all over the place. They love to explore their environment and can be quite efficiant at it, too. A child can touch an excess of 300 surfaces in a mere 30 minutes. If one of these has germs, it means that they can very easily spread these germs all over the house in a very short time. It is important to make sure that their environment is as germ free as possible.

A very effective way of doing so is using disinfectant spray right after you have cleaned your house. Spray makes it easier to reach those hard to reach surfaces. A cheaper alternative is to use a bleach solution mixed with water. For those keen on natural alternatives, you can use vinegar, borax or tree tea oil.

Make sure you disinfect all those surfaces that are commonly touched like doorknobs, light switches, and telephone mouthpieces. Also, ensure that your dishes are properly washed with soap and water too. Do not share spoons, forks and knives without washing them first.

Avoid Exposure

Before you let your child travel or visit friends or relatives, find out whether where they are going is healthy. If they are having friends over, or travelling to a friend’s house for a playdate, try your best to find out if the children they will make contact with are not suffering from colds, flu and other communicable diseases. If your child is ill, don’t let them expose friends to germs. Keep them at home with proper rest and medication until they become better.

Healthy Habits for Healthy Lives

Generally, a healthy child will be less likely to fall ill from any kind of sickness. It is important that you introduce healthy habits for children in your home as early as possible. From teaching your children how to keep clean, getting the right kind of exercise, eating right to getting enough sleep. If your child is young, please make sure that you breast feed them for as long as possible. By doing these things, you build your child’s immune system, making them naturally able to fight off disease.

Visit Your Doctor

If your child gets sick, please make sure that you visit the doctor. It is easy to think that you can self-prescribe medication for your child, however do not do so. For children, if symptoms persist, please do not hesitate to rush them to a trusted pediatrician. They are more sensitive to illness and, as a result, need better care and monitoring.