Almost every eczema conversation I have starts the same way. You found something that worked. For about a fortnight the skin was calm, everyone slept, and you thought that was it. Then it came back, and the cream that fixed it stopped fixing anything.
First, the reassuring part. This is not you doing it wrong.
Topical treatment does exactly what it is designed to do, which is settle inflammation in the skin. It is genuinely useful and I am not going to tell you to stop using it. What it does not do is change whatever is driving the inflammation in the first place. So the skin calms, the driver keeps going, and eventually the skin speaks up again.
What I look at underneath a flare
Digestion, because the gut and the skin are in constant conversation, and a child with reflux, constipation or a very narrow diet often has skin that reflects it.
Sleep, because a broken night makes the itch worse and the itch makes the night worse. That loop will hold a flare open for months.
Food, though rarely in the way people expect. I am slow to take things out of a child's diet. More often the useful question is what is missing rather than what needs to go.
And the ordinary environmental stuff. Washing powder, water, heat, wool, the new sheets, the school jumper.
None of that is exciting. It is also where most of the progress happens.
If you have been cycling through creams for months and the pattern is always the same, the cream is probably not the problem. It is just not the whole answer.