Help Your Children Avoid the Flu and Other Sickness This Fall
Like most parents and guardians, you want to keep your children and the rest of your family as healthy as possible. Even so, if your child is active outside the home with playdates and or extracurriculars, attends a child care program or is back in a school environment, they come into contact with lots of germs every day and chances are they have already had the sniffles or another ailment since summer ended. And there’s a good possibility that whatever cold or sickness they had, someone else in your family ended up getting sick too.
As parents, you can only control so much when it comes to your child getting sick, especially when they are so very young and everything – especially their hands – ends up in their mouth. Now, before the start of the flu season, which according to physicians and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) will begin earlier this year, is a great time to reinforce some preventative actions that you can take with your children to avoid them becoming sick.
Some of the things you can do to help your child stay well are:
Remind your children not to touch their eyes, nose, or mouth as germs spread this way.
Teach them to wash their hands frequently -- after using the bathroom, playing outside, touching a pet, coughing or sneezing, and before eating. And share the five steps to good handwashing -- wet, lather, scrub (for 20 seconds or singing the happy birthday song twice), rinse and dry.
Regularly clean and disinfect your child’s toys, surfaces they touch frequently, shopping carts, and etc.
Discourage sucking on their hands and toys.
Ensure they are getting plenty of sleep with regular naps and a routine bedtime.
Make sure they are eating a variety of foods with healthy snacks and well-balanced meals.
Encourage them to drink lots of water so they stay hydrated.
Ask them not to share personal items like hats, combs, toothbrushes or to drink after someone else.
While teaching your children the healthy habits above will help cut down on the germs they are exposed to, one of the most important ways you can help your child stay healthy is to make sure your child is up to date on all of their vaccinations and boosters. This includes their regular child and adolescent scheduled immunizations for diseases such as polio, which has made a reoccurrence this year in New York, and measles as well as for the flu and the coronavirus.
The COVID pandemic disrupted many normalcies in children’s lives these past two years, including receiving their vaccines on time and attending well check-up visits with their pediatricians. If your child has fallen behind schedule, now is a great time to schedule an appointment with your child’s physician to make a plan to get back on schedule. Here’s the CDC’s recommended schedule for child and adolescent immunizations that you can use for research and to discuss with your child’s doctor.
When your child does get sick, be courteous to your child’s educators and classmates and keep them home from their child care program, school, and other activities. Your child can get the rest and attention they need and other families will be thankful that you took the thoughtful precaution of not spreading the illness.
For further reading:
HealthyChildren: Which Flu Vaccine Should Children Get?
Georgia Department of Public Health: Immunizations
Peach State Health Plan: Get Your Flu Shot
Georgia Department of Public Health: What You Need to Know About Monkeypox, polio, COVID-19 and more
