7 Steps to Prevent Bringing Bedbugs Home from School

“Good night, sleep tight, don’t let the bedbugs bite!” For most of us, we grew up saying this without ever seeing a real bed bug. I remember asking my mom what one was, and she told me that back in the “olden” days there were these bugs that lived in beds and bit people while they slept. My grandmother told me stories about once being bitten by them at a dodgy motel back in the 1940s, but said she had never seen one since then. Relieved that I didn’t have to worry about it, I put it out of my head.

Fast forward 30 years and America is seeing a resurgence of these pesky little beasts. Over 200,000 cases occur in the United States each year. According to the CDC and EPA, bedbugs (Cimex lectularius) do NOT carry diseases. (Thank goodness for small mercies!) However, they can be an incredible nuisance. It often takes weeks, if not months, to eradicate them from your home. To be brutally honest, they terrify me.

Not Just Hotels Anymore

I used to only worry about bedbugs when I traveled. My husband and I tried to mitigate the risks by only staying in reputable hotels, removing the sheets and checking the beds for signs when we checked in, leaving our luggage in the bathroom, and leaving all the luggage zipped. Then, when we got home, I would leave all the luggage in the garage, wash and dry everything on high heat and then spray out the luggage with essential oils and bake it in the sun (or freeze it in the freezer) before bringing it into the house. It worked, we never got bed bugs–even that one time I woke up to find a bedbug crawling over me at a (very nice) hotel, we still didn’t bring any home.

And then this fall I started hearing rumors about several local schools (including one in our district) being infested with bedbugs. I felt blindsided. I didn’t even know that was possible, and the thought of my children potentially carrying bedbugs home with them in their backpacks and jackets freaked the heck out of me. So, in my usual OCD fashion, I started researching ways we could reduce our risk of bringing them home from school and causing an infestation. Here is what I have found so far:

7 Steps to Prevent Bringing Bedbugs Home from School

1. If possible, have your children enter through the garage when returning home from school. If you don’t have a garage, no biggy, just don’t let them run through the entire house with all their school gear still on! And definitely don’t let them head directly to their bedrooms.
2. Set up a place in the garage (or mud room or laundry room) to store their backpacks, jackets and shoes. This way, any bugs hitching a ride in their backpacks don’t make it into the rest of the house. (My husband and I jokingly call this the “decontamination zone.”) If there’s no garage, try to set up someplace away from bedrooms and living rooms (avoid areas containing carpet, clutter, or furniture with lots of nooks and crannies that serve as potential bed-bug hide-outs). In a pinch, you can even use plastic bins to store their school gear away from everything else.
3. Have your children change their clothes as soon as they get home. Honestly, this isn’t a bad idea anyway. I’ve implemented this on and off for awhile just to try to limit dirt and illness from spreading. I know I certainly don’t want the kids jumping up and down on my bed in clothes that may or may not have some other kid’s boogers on them!
4. Leave their clothes in the decontamination zone. The key here is to leave their school clothes in the decontamination zone until you have time to wash them. Don’t bring the clothes in and dump them in the hamper, or you’ll run the risk of bringing the bugs into the rest of your house. Once again, a plastic storage bin with a lid is handy. Even a clear garbage bag that you can seal would work well.
5. Wash and dry clothes on the highest heat setting they can take. Obviously, you don’t want to shrink their clothes. If the clothes can’t take high heat, try using a few drops of peppermint essential oil in the laundry. It should help kill the bugs. The majority of bed bug killer sprays that I have seen use peppermint oil as one of their main ingredients.
6. Empty backpacks and look for bugs. If you find any, put them in a sealed ziplock baggy and step on them a few times for good measure. It will make you feel better.
7. Spray backpacks, shoes, and jackets with a natural bed bug killer. (Or, once again, wash and dry on the highest heat setting they can take.) There are a ton of natural bed bug killer sprays on the market. Amazon has quite a few. MDXconcepts Bed Bug Killer, in particular, gets a lot of good reviews. I just ordered some. However, if you would like to save roughly $20 and some time, you could also try making your own in about 5 minutes using ingredients you most likely already have on hand.

Anatomy of Bed Bug Spray

I’ve noticed that a lot of the natural bed bug sprays on the market contain the same active ingredients over and over. The first ingredient is some type of soap or detergent (often sodium lauryl sulfate) and the next several are usually essential oils (a mix of peppermint, spearmint, tea tree and/or clove—which are all known as bug repellents). Then, the other 97% is something inert that they often don’t even list out—most likely water and goodness knows what preservatives.

Now, I’m not a huge fan of sodium lauryl sulfate, but I understand why they need something like it for these sprays. Soap or detergent has two functions here:

1. Soap acts as a natural bug killer. Insects breath through small vents on their bodies, and soap clings to their bodies and suffocates them.
2. Soap acts as an emulsifier for the essential oils. Anyone who has ever made salad dressing with vinegar and oil knows first hand that oil and water don’t mix. Well, the same is true for essential oils. If you want them to mix with water so you can spray them, you need an emulsifier to help them do this. Hence, the soap. I like to use homemade soapnut extract because it is nontoxic and leaves virtually no residue.

Homemade Bed Bug Spray

Now that we know that all we need is soap, essential oils, water and a glass spray bottle, we can easily make our own bed bug killer for a fraction of the cost of store-bought versions. Here is my recipe:

I realize this entire process may seem a bit intense and OCD. I’m not even sure if I’ll be able to keep it up long-term, but I do intend to follow this procedure for at least a few weeks whenever I hear of local outbreaks. Anything to help reduce the risk of an infestation! So, if you choose to do something similar, I hope this list and recipe help. No matter what, you have my best wishes for a bed-bug-free home!