Back to School, Back to Being Sick Every Two Weeks

Back-to-school season is wonderful. New teachers. New friends. New backpacks. New pencils. New viruses your child has apparently been assigned to collect like Pokémon.

Every August and September, parents start asking me some version of the same question: “Why is my child sick AGAIN?” Sometimes the child was healthy for four whole days, which apparently now qualifies as a wellness retreat. They had a cough, got better, went back to school, developed a runny nose, recovered, then vomited on Tuesday, and by Friday somebody in the house has pink eye. Parents start wondering if their child has an immune deficiency. Usually, thankfully, they do not. Young children can get a remarkable number of viral infections, especially when they first enter daycare, preschool, or school. Younger children average around seven or eight colds a year, and some children exposed to lots of other kids can have even more.

The problem is that “eight colds per year” sounds manageable until you remember that a cough can linger for two or three weeks. Then another virus arrives before the first cough has completely packed its bags. Suddenly your child has been “sick since October,” you have forgotten what mucus-free parenting looks like, and you are considering changing the family surname to Mucinex.

So can you prevent every illness? No. Unless your plan is to put your child in a climate-controlled glass enclosure and send homework through an airlock, children are going to encounter viruses. The immune system develops partly through exposure to the world. But there is a very large difference between “you cannot prevent everything” and “there is nothing you can do.”

There are absolutely things I do in my own home, things I keep on hand, and things I routinely discuss with families in the office that can make sick season much easier. Some are boring. Some are surprisingly useful. Some have better research behind them than others. And some are simply the things you learn after enough years of being both a pediatrician and the person wandering around your own house at midnight looking for the thermometer.

And yes, I am going to tell you what is actually in my cabinet.

The rest of this article is for upgraded members. I am going through the basics I think matter most, the exact things I like having available before anyone gets sick, what I tend to do at the first hint of illness, which supplements I think are worth considering, which ones I mostly ignore, what I recommend for fever, cough, congestion, stomach bugs, hydration, and recovery, plus the signs that make me stop thinking “another school virus” and start thinking we should look deeper.

If your child gets sick every other week—or you would simply prefer not to be standing in CVS at midnight debating grape versus bubble-gum acetaminophen—this is probably one worth saving.

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