Germ Warfare! How to Help Your Kids Stay Healthy in the Classroom

By Christina Elston

Back-to-School Doesn't Have to Mean Colds and Flu

As a stay-at-home dad, Chuck Hubbeling has plenty of experience with colds and the flu. So when a new school year starts, this father of four children, ranging in age from 3 to 7, braces for the inevitable sniffles and sneezes. “I would say it comes in waves,” he says. “If one person has it, everybody’s going to have it.”

Even his wife, a pediatrician, doesn’t bring home as much illness as the kids.

Back-to-school means back to weekday routines, homework and extracurricular activities. But for many families, it also means a return to the onslaught of colds, viruses and other health problems that teem in a classroom of kids. Children starting kindergarten or preschool often bring home a series of illnesses as they grow accustomed to their classmates.

There is a positive side to all the sniffling that results. “It does build up the immune systems of the kids, which is a process that everyone has to go through. So there is a silver lining,” says Lisa Chamberlain, M.D., a pediatrics instructor at Stanford University.

Most of the infectious organisms (“germs”) that people encounter are viruses, which the body produces antibodies against and learns to fight off, explains John Bradley, M.D., an infectious disease expert and a spokesperson for the American Academy of Pediatrics. The more viruses children encounter, the more antibodies their little bodies make, and the less likely they are to get sick. Children with siblings at home, or who have been to daycare or preschool, start building immunity early. Others start kindergarten with relatively little exposure to other kids. “Every virus they come into contact with, they’ll get an infection with,” Bradley says.

A Healthy Foundation for Fighting Colds

Despite parents’ best efforts, most kids will have an average of three to six respiratory illnesses per year, says Ralph Feigin, M.D., physician in chief at Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston. Still, if you’re healthy to begin with, you’ve got a better chance of warding off illness.

To give kids’ bodies a head start at staying healthy, experts offer the following recommendations:

• Have your children fully vaccinated before they enter school, and vaccinated against influenza annually, Feigin advises.

• Make sure your kids are eating right. Malnourished people are more susceptible to getting sick, Bradley notes. “If you’re healthy, your body has all of the tools it needs to respond well to infection.”