Tips To Ensure Your Child Stays Healthy When They Head Back To School

Yaay… It’s back to school season! Your home is filled with new stationary, books, school bags, water bottles and everything new for the new year.  Though kids miss their carefree vacation, the excitement of a new beginning over rules everything else. As for parents, you are happy seeing your baby growing up, but lurking at the back of your mind is the inevitable evil- back to school illness! Back to school is often associated as a time when there is a high incidence of cold, flu and fever. My son who often falls sick during school days hasn’t even caught a cold in the past two months of vacation. So, how exactly can we prevent, if not avoid, children falling sick this back to school season. Here are some tips that could help.

• Researches have shown that there is a direct link between sleep and immunity. So, ensure your child gets at least 8 hours of sleep. The change in routine is likely to disrupt your child’s sleep pattern in the first few days. Even so, if you take care to limit the screen time before bed and encourage reading instead, they are likely to get enough sleep.
• Indian parents are notorious for blurting one sentence every now and then- “Go and study.” But all work and no play makes Jack not only dull but also sick. Physical activity is proven to reduce the chance of getting cold, flu and other illness. So, instead of asking your child to go and study, ask him to go and play for at least an hour before they start studying.
• It goes without saying that eating healthy food is important, so is drinking lot of water. At the minimum, ensure that your child drinks a glass of lime juice everyday. Lime is loaded with Vitamin C, which is immensely beneficial in improving immunity. Of course, you can add Kiwi, dry fruits, leafy vegetables and such immunity boosting food to your child’s diet if you are not blessed with a picky eater!
• There will always be one child or the other who never sneezes in to a towel. So, at the best what you can do is ask your child to thoroughly wash his/her hands and face regularly. I stress on “thoroughly” because children usually just wet their hands and say they have washed their hands. Also make sure that the first thing they do once they get back home is take a long warm bath!
• Give your child hand sanitizers only if he/she falls sick extremely often. By using hand sanitizers and reducing exposure to germs, your child is in fact becoming less immune more susceptible to illness.
• Finally, please… pretty please… don’t send your child to school if he/she is sick so that the whole class doesn’t get ill. Ideally, after a period of sickness, your child should go through 24 hours without any medication before he/she resumes school.