Jun
29
Infant Constipation
June 29, 2007 |
As many infants do, my daughter experienced constipation issues after we started giving her solid food when she was a little over 6 months old. A very good friend of mine recommended I start my daughter on oatmeal cereal as opposed to rice cereal so I thought I would be free of any infant constipation issues. I learned later that the vast majority of babies suffer from constipation after starting on solid food so I had to find something that would help.
I am not someone who automatically turns to medication when a health issue occurs so we started with the most natural product I could think of which is prunes. Knowing that my daughter was not the first baby to ever experience constipation, I knew there had to be a safe prune product available on the market. To my delight, Gerber has a variety of juices, one of which is apple/prune juice, so we started with a couple of tablespoons mixed with her cereal one day a week. This mixture did not seem to have quite the speedy effect I was hoping so we increased the timeframe to two or three days a week. This helped somewhat, but it was difficult once we introduced the vegetables along with the one feeding of cereal a day, to regulate the amount of apple/prune juice.
Anyone who has had to watch their child experience pain knows how helpless you feel when all you are able to do is comfort them. I was not to the point where I felt I needed to poke and prod to get things moving, but I did finally buy some Fleet brand baby suppositories which I ended up not using because the following day was “diaper explosion day”. After that we realized things worked best by giving my daughter the apple/prune juice in the cereal every other day. It was only after all this, that I happened to look at the main ingredient in the vitamin Tri-Vi-Sol recommended by my daughter’s pediatrician which was glycerin, the same main ingredient in the suppositories that acts as a laxative.
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It is tough to see your little one suffer. We were big fans of apple juice during these times.