Mum leaves daughter infested with head lice ‘because she’s vegan’

A mother’s extreme lifestyle choices have left her daughter crawling with nits, according to her desperate neighbour.

The concerned woman wrote to an online agony aunt complaining that the mum’s fierce commitment to veganism means that she refuses to kill any living thing – even her child’s head lice.

In her letter to Nine.com.au columnist Alex Carlton, the woman explained: "My seven-year-old daughter is best friends with the girl next door, whose family are vegan. That's fine; we respect their choice and even make special food when little River comes to play.

“My problem is that recently this otherwise delightful child was at our house and scratching furiously... and I discovered she was crawling with head lice."

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She continued: “I'm pretty easygoing – which kid doesn't get nits every now and then? – and casually mentioned it to her mum thinking she'd jump right on it.

“To my surprise, this woman said that not only did she know about her daughter's condition but refused to do anything about it. Vegans don't kill any living things, is the reason.

“My neighbour told me she was in the practice of combing the lice and nits into the garden where they had a chance of survival. My jaw hit the floor.”

She ended her plea for help: “What do I do now? I don't want to separate the kids but there's no way ‘combing them into the garden’ is going to work (industrial-grade pesticide barely works) and I don't want my daughter covered in vermin."

Nits are the bane of every primary school-aged child's scalpiStock

Carlton replied by branding the neighbour a “sanctimonious twit” whose “combing them out” method was, clearly, doomed to fail.

“I'm tempted to suggest you set up a game of ‘hairdressers’ for the girls in the bathroom and get out the full nuclear nit arsenal, but I fear you'd risk upsetting the child's mother,” she joked.

“You could also call this unbearable matriarch's bluff and explain that you love the kids being BFFs but that you'd like to make sure the nits are completely gone before they play together again," she added.

"But it doesn't sound like you'd get far. And now that they're attached, you can't exactly stop your daughter and this presumably nice neighbour girl being friends – morally or practically.”

Carlton went on to suggest a “more granular form of prevention”, recommending that the desperate mum “focus solely on what you can do to keep your own offspring pestilence-free”.

“Keep your daughter's hair tied back as tightly as possible and use a protective spray,” she advised.

“My friend Rebel swears by a combination of conditioner, tea-tree and eucalyptus oils, and water, which she sprays onto her kids' hair for a full week without washing.

“Sure your daughter will stink [...] but considering your daughter is usually seen standing next to someone whose hair jumps up and down like a nightclub dance floor, I don't think anyone's going to notice.”

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