What To Do If A Child Has Been Stung By A Scorpion In The Home

By Georgia Clubb, Seal Out Scorpions

Reviewed by Georgia A. Clubb, Advanced Scorpion Specialist. Updated July 2026.

A bark scorpion sting can range from a mild tingle and temporary numbness to extreme pain and, rarely, a life-threatening reaction. Most healthy adults do fine. Young children and the elderly are the ones at real risk of severe reactions, and even a minor sting is scary, traumatizing, and painful for a young child and their family.

We talk with parents and grandparents every year who call for information on keeping scorpions out of the home and protecting the young children in it. Unfortunately, we also hear from many families looking for the same information after a child has already been stung and had a severe reaction. Babies and young children are stung every year in their cribs, their beds, and other places inside the home.

Here’s the guidance we give those families, starting with what to do in the moment.

Call Poison Control First

If your child has been stung, call the national Poison Help line at 1-800-222-1222. It connects you to the Arizona Poison and Drug Information Center, staffed around the clock. They will tell you, based on your child’s symptoms, whether home care is enough or the child needs to be seen. The large majority of bark scorpion stings, more than 95 percent, cause only minor effects. But severe reactions concentrate in young children, so don’t guess. Make the call.

When should we go straight to the emergency room? If your child has trouble breathing or swallowing, is drooling excessively, shows odd eye movements, or has uncontrolled muscle jerking, call 911 or go to the nearest emergency department now and call Poison Control on the way. Those are the signs of a severe reaction, and effective hospital treatment exists, including Anascorp, the FDA-approved scorpion antivenom developed for exactly these cases.

“I was stung by a scorpion while I was asleep in my bed, which was pretty traumatizing, lol. It completely changed how I felt about being in my own home. When I told my previous pest control company what happened, I was basically told this was normal for desert life and to continue business as usual, with some extra spraying near my doors. That gave me no peace of mind at all.”

Katrina Riobuya, five-star Google review

How To Recognize A Sting In A Young Child

A young child often can’t tell you what happened. Watch for these symptoms:

• Uncontrollable crying for no apparent reason
• Restlessness
• Difficulty breathing
• Twitching or thrashing muscles
• Accelerated or irregular heartbeat
• Odd head, neck, and eye movements
• Excessive drooling and/or sweating
• Nausea and/or vomiting
• Elevated blood pressure
• Throbbing or numbness in a specific area

A bark scorpion sting typically causes immediate, intense local pain with little or no visible swelling, and the site becomes extremely sensitive to touch. Symptoms tend to build over the first few hours, which is why early contact with Poison Control matters.

Simple First Aid While You Get Advice

Wash the sting site with soap and water, apply a cool compress, keep your child as calm as you can, and use age-appropriate over-the-counter pain relief if Poison Control advises it. Skip the folk remedies. Don’t cut the site, try to suck out venom, or apply a tourniquet. And don’t treat a sting like an allergic reaction with antihistamines unless a medical professional tells you to.

Capture The Scorpion If You Safely Can

It shouldn’t be your first priority, but if you can find the scorpion, trap it under a glass or jar. You do not want it loose in the house for a second incident, and identifying it helps. Only the Arizona bark scorpion is medically significant, and it’s recognizable by its slender pincers and thin tail.

If you can’t find it, resist the urge to have a technician spray inside the house. Scorpions aren’t insects, and insecticides sprayed indoors are not very effective against them. A nighttime black-light search will locate scorpions far more reliably than a spray will kill them.

Have A Plan Before It Happens

If you live in a home known or suspected to have scorpion activity, decide in advance what you’ll do when a sting happens: who calls Poison Control, which hospital you’d go to, where the flashlight and the jar live. Families handle a 2 a.m. sting far better when the plan already exists. Check your neighborhood on our scorpion heat map to understand the pressure around your home, because a single scorpion sighting usually signals more.

Prevention: Protect The Home And Yard

Scorpions are not so much a problem of a home as a problem of the neighborhood. Building your property’s immune system against neighborhood scorpion pressure means two things: sealing and weatherizing the house so they can’t get in, and managing the yard so it doesn’t feed and shelter them.

When sealing, start where you least want to find a scorpion. The ceiling fan or duct over the bed. The fresh-air fan over the toilet. The casing above the bedroom door. Work from the ceiling down to the floor, and from the bedrooms out to the common living spaces. Then extend the same discipline to the exterior of the home. For sleeping areas specifically, our quick take on scorpions in the bedroom covers the details parents ask about most.

Will sealing alone keep my kids safe? Sealing is the strongest single protection because it stands between the neighborhood population and your child’s room, and it’s where we start. It works best inside a full system: yard habitat removal, verification by black light, and prescriptive treatment where needed. That combination is the scorpion solution we’ve refined over 25 years.

“Once our infant son started crawling, we new we had to do something since all of our scorpions were bark, and thus potentially deadly to our baby. Seal Out Scorpions came highly recommended by some coworkers, and, boy, did they not disappoint!”

Ashlee P., five-star Yelp review

Seal Out Scorpions Is Here To Help

Seal Out Scorpions offers the most advanced scorpion management programs, advice, and education in the Southwest. Our staff is educated, skilled, and empathetic, with a passion for helping families stop living in fear of these creatures.

Call or text 480-820-7325, or request a quote. If you’re not sure what’s infesting your property, start with our scorpion identification application and we’ll help you find out.

Georgia Clubb is the owner of Seal Out Scorpions in Tempe, Arizona. ROC 287016, OPM 9658. Licensed, bonded, and insured. This article is general information, not medical advice. For any sting, call Poison Control at 1-800-222-1222.