Will Kindergarten Be an Illness Nightmare? What I Learned From My First Kid’s First Semester
Last September, I stood in the kindergarten drop-off line with a crumpled pack of travel wipes in one hand and my 5-year-old Luka’s sticky cherry popsicle hand in the other. A little boy two spots ahead blew his nose directly onto the sidewalk, then grabbed the classroom door handle to pull his mom inside. I pulled out my phone right then and typed into our neighborhood first-time parent group chat: “Am I the only one already expecting a total illness nightmare this semester?”
Within a minute, I had 17 replies. Half of them were horror stories about months of back-to-back colds, pink eye that bounced through every family member, and missed birthdays and work deadlines. The other half said I was overreacting, that it couldn’t be that bad. I didn’t know who to believe, so I crossed my fingers, kissed Luka goodbye, and waited for the other shoe to drop.
It dropped faster than I expected. Week two of school, Luka came home sniffling, coughing so hard he woke me up three times a night. A COVID test came back negative, but by the end of the week, my 2-year-old daughter and I both had the same cold. We missed a full week of work, toddler story time, and Luka’s first class field trip to the pumpkin patch. Two weeks after we recovered, Luka woke up with crusted shut eyes from pink eye. We got prescription drops, but he rubbed his eyes all over the living room couch, and I spent an hour scrubbing every cushion with disinfectant. Ten days later, my toddler woke up with the same pink eye, then I got it. I had to lead a client Zoom call wearing dark sunglasses, because my eyes were too swollen and red to show on camera. By the end of October, Luka had hand, foot, and mouth, and I’d already used up all of my paid sick days for the year. I was convinced the doomsayers were right: kindergarten really was just one giant illness nightmare that would never end.
At our mid-November parent-teacher conference, I joked about my new life of coffee and expired lozenges to Luka’s teacher Ms. Rita, who’s been teaching kindergarten for 22 years. She laughed and said she hears the same worry from every first-time parent, every single year. It’s not that kindergarten is inherently a germ-infested nightmare, she said. It’s just that most kids have never been around that many other kids that close, for that long, every single day. Their immune systems haven’t seen most of these common germs before, so they get sick as they build up protection. For almost every kid, that bumpy period lasts the first semester, and then it slows way down.
Then she gave me a handful of small, low-fuss changes that made way more difference than the big, exhausting cleaning routines I’d seen online. She said stop doing the 5-minute hand washing detour at drop-off that holds up the line and makes kids late for morning circle. Most kids rush through it anyway, and half the time they don’t even get their hands actually clean. Instead, keep a small, kid-scented hand sanitizer in your bag, and squirt their hands while you hug them goodbye. It takes 10 seconds, no fuss, and cuts down on the immediate germ transfer from shared door handles and crayon boxes. I tried it, and it fit right into our routine without any extra work.
Next, she said pre-pack a permanent sick bag to leave at the school nurse’s office. I stuffed it with a full change of clothes, extra underwear, a pack of travel wipes, a disposable mask, and checked with the nurse to add a single-dose packet of children’s Tylenol with a note that I okayed giving it for low fevers before I could leave work to pick Luka up. Before this, the nurse would call me when Luka had a 99.8 fever after running around at recess, even if he was sitting fine eating a snack, and I’d have to drop everything to come get him. Now, they give him Tylenol, he finishes the school day, and I pick him up after my work is done. That alone saved me three unplanned half-days off in the last four months.
Last, she said stop keeping your kid home for every little runny nose. If they don’t have a fever over 100.4, they’re eating fine, and playing normally, that residual sniffling is almost never contagious after the first three days of a cold. Most schools allow kids to attend with runny noses now anyway, as long as they don’t have a fever. I used to keep Luka home for two extra days just because he was still sniffling, which just meant more missed school and more missed work for me, for no reason.
I started doing all three of these small things, and by December, Luka only had one small cold that never even spread to the rest of the family. This semester, he’s missed just one full day of school, for a mild stomach bug that passed in 24 hours. It’s not perfect. I still find crumpled used tissues in the pockets of Luka’s winter jackets when I do laundry, we still go through a full box of tissues a week during cold season, and every few months a mild germ cycles through the house. But it’s not the endless nightmare I was expecting back in September.
Last week, a friend whose son is starting kindergarten this fall texted me the same question I asked back in September: “Is kindergarten actually just going to be one big illness nightmare, like everyone says?” I told her what I know: It will be messy for a while, you’ll probably use up all your sick days and half a bottle of hand sanitizer, and you’ll probably end up with pink eye at least once. But it’s not forever. The tiny, 10-second daily habits work way better than the big, exhausting disinfecting marathons you see on social media. Right now, Luka’s at school, my toddler’s napping, and I haven’t had to wear sunglasses to a work call in four months. That’s as good as it gets, I think.
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