Why Is My Kid Always Sick Already? A Teacher Mom’s Practical Guide For The School Year
I’m leaning against the kitchen counter, sipping cold coffee that’s been sitting there since 6 a.m., when my 7-year-old Milo drags his backpack over and blinks up at me, voice scratchy: “How am I sick already?”
It’s been exactly 12 days of second grade. Twelve days of me reminding him to wash his hands before snack, twelve days of me reminding him not to drink out of other kids’ water bottles, twelve days of me spraying his backpack with that expensive germ spray everyone was raving about back in August. He just got over a cold two weeks before school started. Before that, he had a stomach bug in July that kept us home for the Fourth of July picnic. Before that, strep throat in May that made him miss his end-of-year field day.
He pulls a crumpled tissue out of his sleeve and blows his nose loud enough to make our cat jump off the table. “I did all the stuff you told me,” he says. “Why does my throat hurt again?”
I’ve been asking the same question as a 2nd grade teacher, too. Last week I had 11 out of 21 kids out with something or other: three with strep, five with colds, three with stomach bugs. Five different parents texted me between 10 p.m. and 2 a.m. to say their kid was out sick, and every one of them ended the text with some version of the same question: We just got over a cold two weeks ago, how is he sick again?
Last year I was so stressed about this I made an appointment with Milo’s pediatrician, convinced there was something wrong with his immune system. I’d read all the posts about how to support immunity, I was buying organic everything, making him take a multivitamin every morning, wiping down every doorknob in the house twice a week. We still managed to miss 12 days of school between September and November. I sat in the pediatrician’s exam room, holding a list of all his illnesses, and she just leaned back and laughed. She said she sees four to five parents a week this time of year with the exact same list and exact same question.
What she told me stuck, and what I tell parents now when they ask me at conferences: Before kids start school, they’re only exposed to the germs that live in your house, plus whatever they pick up from the occasional playdate or trip to the grocery store. When they suddenly spend six hours a day in a room with 20 other kids, all putting their hands in their mouths, sharing crayons, coughing into the same group snack bowl, that’s hundreds of new germs their body has never encountered before. It’s normal for kids to get 8 to 12 colds a year for the first two or three years of elementary school. It’s not that you’re doing something wrong, and it’s not that their immune system is weak. It’s just that their immune system is doing its job: meeting all these new germs and learning how to fight them, so they don’t get as sick when they’re older.
That took a lot of pressure off, but it didn’t solve the everyday hassle of constantly being sick. Over the last two years, I’ve figured out a few small things that work way better than all the fancy supplements and constant sanitizing I used to do.
First, I leave the first three months of the school year half unplanned. I used to book every weekend with birthday parties, day trips, family visits, and I’d end up stressed and guilty when we had to cancel everything because someone had a cold. Now I only book one big thing a month, and leave the rest of the weekends open. If we’re healthy, we go to the park or run errands, no big deal. If someone’s sick, we don’t lose any money or disappoint anyone by canceling last minute.
Second, I cut way back on the sanitizing. I used to carry a bottle of hand sanitizer in my bag and make Milo use it every time we touched a doorknob or a shopping cart. I used to wipe down his entire desk and cubby every Friday after school. Now we just stick to plain old soap and water: wash hands for 20 seconds before eating, after using the bathroom, and after blowing your nose. That’s it. I don’t do the extra sanitizing. The pediatrician told me that killing every single germ around them actually keeps their immune system from getting the practice it needs fighting small, harmless germs. It’s low effort, and it’s saved me a ton of time I used to spend wiping everything down.
Third, we have a clear rule for when to stay home: if you have a fever over 100 degrees, are throwing up, or have diarrhea, you stay home. If you just have a runny nose or a scratchy throat and you feel up to going, you go. A lot of parents think keeping a slightly sick kid home stops the spread, but by the time symptoms show up, everyone in the class has already been exposed. And letting a kid go when they feel okay means they don’t miss out on fun stuff like art day or field trips, and their immune system gets to keep building that resistance.
Back to this morning, I felt Milo’s forehead, it was just a little warm, no fever. He said he felt fine enough to go, because today was the day they got to paint their papier mache dragons. I packed an extra pack of tissues in his backpack, dropped a lemon drop in his lunch box to soothe his throat, and texted his teacher to let her know he might ask for extra water. He ran off to the bus stop, backpack bouncing, half-finished dragon sketch sticking out the top of his bag.
I’m still standing here, looking at the pile of unfolded laundry on the couch, my cold coffee gone lukewarm. Last night I was up three times with my 4-year-old, who has a cough that won’t go away. I don’t know if someone will get sent home from school today with a fever. I don’t know if we’ll have to cancel my brother’s birthday dinner this weekend. I do know that this won’t last forever: by the time Milo is in fourth grade, he’ll get sick way less often, and we’ll go months without someone having a constant runny nose. For now, I just keep an extra box of tissues on the kitchen counter, a few frozen lasagnas in the freezer, and stop asking how we got sick already. It’s just part of the first few years of school, and we’re taking it one cold at a time.
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