Your child spent the summer outside, ate ice cream in the rain, and barely sniffled. Two weeks into daycare there is a runny nose, then a cough, then a fever, and a few days later the same cough is working its way through you and the baby. Almost every family in Estonia goes through some version of this in September, and it does not mean you missed something in August.
Why the timing is so predictable
At home, a small child meets a handful of people in a week. In a daycare group they share a room, a floor, a bathroom, a table and a box of toys with a whole group of other children, every weekday, for hours. Most of the ordinary viruses moving around that room are ones your child has not met before, and there are a lot of them.
Small children also do everything that helps a virus travel. Hands go in mouths, fingers go into someone else's snack, a wooden digger gets chewed and handed over, and a sneeze goes wherever it likes. Autumn moves all of that indoors, with the windows shut and the radiators on.
So the pattern is not really about your child being fragile. It is a new environment, a lot of shared surfaces, and a body meeting a lot of new things at once. What you can influence is how much of it comes home with you and how far it spreads once it is there.
The habit worth defending: hands before food
If you only enforce one thing, make it hand washing before eating. It is the moment a child's hands go straight from the toy shelf, the sandbox and the door handle into their own mouth. The same goes for after the toilet, and for the first minute after you walk in your own front door.
A few things make it stick with a two or three year old:
- Make it part of the sequence, not a request. Coat off, shoes off, hands washed, then food. Children argue with instructions and go along with routines.
- Soap and warm water, and long enough to actually rub. Count out loud, or let your child pick a song and wash until it ends. Fingertips, thumbs and between the fingers are the bits that get skipped.
- Dry properly. Give each child their own towel in the bathroom instead of one shared family towel, and change them often.
- Wash your own hands too, out loud. You are the demonstration. A child who watches a parent wash before making sandwiches stops treating it as a punishment.
Keep toothbrushes apart rather than in one shared cup, and send your child with their own labelled water bottle so bottles do not get swapped at the table.
For the times there is no sink
The gap in most days is the stretch between daycare and home. Playground after pickup, snack in the car, a quick stop at the shop, a bus handrail, then a rice cake handed over in the back seat with unwashed hands.
A small bottle of hand gel in the coat pocket or your bag covers that gap. The Antiseptic hand gel fits in a jacket pocket, which is the only real test of whether it gets used. If you'd rather it lived on your child's bag than at the bottom of yours, Mad Beauty's pocket sanitisers are sold as bag charms, in Cool as a Cucumber and Cool Lemonade. Older children tend to use the one they chose themselves.
Gel is for the walk home and the playground bench. Once you are inside, soap and water at the sink still does the job better, so keep both habits rather than swapping one for the other.
Stopping the relay race at home
The part that wears parents out is not the first cold. It is the second and third round, when it goes child, then sibling, then both adults, then back again three weeks later.
Give the unwell child their own cup and towel for the week and keep them separate from the others. Wash hands after nose wiping, before cooking and before feeding a baby. Use paper tissues once and bin them instead of leaving a cloth handkerchief in a pocket all day. Wipe the handles, taps and light switches that everyone in the house touches. Open the windows properly a few times a day, even when it is cold, because a stuffy heated flat in October is exactly where everyone spends their evenings.
And protect sleep and regular meals during those weeks, for the adults as much as the children. A parent working through a week of broken nights is the least likely person in the house to remember any of the above.
When to ask a professional
A run of colds in the first daycare autumn is common. If you are worried about how often your child is unwell, how long an illness is lasting, or about any specific symptom, that is a question for your family doctor or family nurse rather than a parenting forum at midnight.
Order a pocket hand sanitiser from Lastenurk and clip it to your child's daycare bag before tomorrow's drop-off.