Bed Bugs In A Kid's Room: Where To Look First

Search the mattress first, then the frame, then the couple of feet of floor around the bed. Launder and tumble dry whatever can take the heat, bag what cannot, and keep pesticides off a child's mattress and toys. Then get the room inspected, because the one thing a bite will not tell you is what bit.

Bed bugs pay no attention to the season, but late autumn moves people around. A sleepover, a week at a relative's house, a bed frame somebody passed along, a coat that spent the afternoon in a pile. A kid's bedroom collects all of it, and it is also the room with the most stuff on the floor.

Start At The Bed, Not The Whole Room

Michigan State University Extension puts the early infestation in the tufts and folds of the mattress, and that is where a flashlight earns its keep before anything else gets pulled apart. Work out from there in rings: mattress seams, then the box spring, then the frame, then what is stored underneath.

• Both mattresses on a bunk. A bunk or a loft doubles the seams and adds ladder brackets, guard rail bolts and the joint where the rails meet the posts. Every one of those is a crevice.
• The trundle, pulled all the way out. A trundle spends its life closed and dark, which is the whole appeal.
• Screw holes and joints in the frame. Wooden frames give more harborage than metal ones, and the hardware is where people stop looking.
• A mattress on the floor. It removes the gap but not the problem. The seam is still a seam, and now the floor edge is part of the bed.
• Everything in the under-bed layer. Ohio State University Extension's guidance is to reduce the items under the bed and in the bedroom to take away hiding spots, which in a child's room usually means the bins come out.

The same Ohio State fact sheet recommends bed bug proof encasements on the mattress and box spring, left on for at least a year, so anything sealed inside cannot feed or escape and anything new has nowhere subtle to hide. Our room by room walkthrough for checking for bed bugs covers the rest of the sweep, and it applies to a kid's room with one adjustment: expect the clutter to be part of the inspection.

The Stuffed Animals Are Where Everybody Stalls

This is the question that stops a parent cold, and the answer is better than people fear. The California Childcare Health Program at UC San Francisco notes that bed bugs often arrive on soft toys and backpacks, and its advice is to wash the washable ones and dry them hot for at least 20 minutes, or to tumble the ones that cannot be washed in a hot dryer for the same 20 minutes. Toys that come through that go into sealed plastic boxes until the room is handled.

Nothing on that list starts with the curb. Dragging a mattress or a toy box out of the house tends to spread an infestation through the hallway on the way, which is the case our post on throwing away furniture over bed bugs lays out in full.

What Should Never Go On A Child's Bed

The Environmental Protection Agency is blunt about the most common mistake: never use a pesticide indoors that is labeled for outdoor use, because it is dangerous and it will not solve the problem. Its consumer alert on bed bug products puts the same rule on the homeowner and on anyone they hire. Before anything is applied anywhere in the house, the label needs an EPA registration number and it needs to name bed bugs, and if bed bugs are not on the label the product has not been tested against them.

The reason this matters more in a child's room than anywhere else is in a CDC report on acute illnesses linked to insecticides used against bed bugs. The misapplications it describes included spraying beds and a crib mattress, and one infant became ill after lying on a mattress that had been treated with an undiluted indoor insecticide. A child sleeps with their face against that surface.

That same childcare health note makes the practical substitution: use a plain encasement rather than a mattress cover that contains a pesticide. Covers and sprays sold for the job are also where most DIY attempts quietly fail, which we went through in why bed bug sprays and bug bombs fail.

Backpacks, Coats And The Trip To School

Texas A&M AgriLife Extension's advice sheet for parents handles the traveling half of this. During an outbreak, keep school bags and coats out of the bedroom and away from the bed and the couch, and seal backpacks in plastic bins between uses. If something turns up in a child's belongings, isolate those items and run them through the washer and dryer on the highest heat the fabric allows.

It runs the other way too, and the school end of it is calmer than parents expect. EPA's guidance for schools says one bed bug is not an infestation, and the Ohio rules about what may be applied in a classroom are covered in our piece on pesticide rules in Ohio schools. At home, the instinct to move the child to the couch or into a sibling's room is the one worth resisting. Bed bugs follow where somebody sleeps, so a new sleeping spot usually becomes a second infested spot.

Why Heat Suits A Room Like This One

A child's bedroom is mostly soft goods: a mattress, a pile of plush, curtains, a rug, a closet of clothes. ThermaLock heat treatment is our lead method for bed bugs because it brings the whole room to a lethal temperature and kills every life stage, eggs included, typically in a single day and with no chemical residue left behind. In a room where a four year old sleeps and plays on the floor, that last part is the one parents ask about first.

Heat work needs preparation, and the office talks it through with you before anything is scheduled, because what leaves the room and what stays is not obvious. Our guide to preparing a home for heat treatment covers the sorting, and the method itself is laid out on our bed bug heat treatment page. Where heat is not the right fit for a property, a bio-chemical bed bug treatment is the second option.

Getting The Room Looked At

If you have found something in a child's bed and you are not certain what it is, an inspection settles it faster than another night of searching with a phone light. We are a fourth-generation company working out of North Canton across Stark, Summit, Portage, Wayne and Tuscarawas counties, and the inspection fee is waived when you go with us for treatment. Call 330-494-6199 or schedule an inspection and we will start with the bed.