Getting the Toughest Baby to Take His Medicine

Unfortunately, my little boy, Clark, has had a reoccurring anal abscess (or butt bump) over the past three months. Each occurrence meant another 10 day round of antibiotics. With each round my son has become less of a good sport about taking his medicine. He's also becoming stronger and smarter as time goes on. He literally fights taking his medicine. Getting him to take his medicine is mission-critical turned mission: impossible.

So I've run the gambit of techniques and tricks to get an infant to take his medicine. Admittedly, Clark is a worst case scenario, so many of the techniques that did not work for him may work for other infants. Here's a run-down of the various techniques and tools I have come across and what worked on my little worst case scenario (if you have a code red medicine refuser too, feel free to skip to #6).

Techniques:

1. Put it in Milk:  I've had people recommend that I put Clark's medicine in 2 oz. of milk. The assumption is he won't notice the taste of the medicine in that much liquid. Perhaps, my lil guy is a future chef and has a highly developed palette (for an infant). I added his dose (1 tsp) of medicine to a bottle of milk (4 oz.).  He noticed it on the first sip. You could see the look of disgust on his face. He then refused to drink the rest of the milk. So we lost a dose of medicine and a bottle of breast milk. This works for most babies though.

2. Mix it in Food: If your child has already moved on to solid foods, you could mix his medicine in with his food. The pharmacist recommended mixing the antibiotic with rice cereal. The pink color (of the medicine, not cereal) would make it easy to see if your child had finished all the medicine. Unfortunately, making the rice cereal with (breast) milk, meant that mixing in the medicine, meant a waste of all three when Clark refused to eat it. My son had the same response as he did with medicine mixed in with his milk. He was displeased.

Distraction: King of Parenting Tricks

In my last post, I began a discussion of ways to outsmart your children.  I discussed "The Big Baby Bath" and now I'll get into "Distraction."

In my opinion, distraction is the king of parenting tricks.  It's a way to get a child (and even adults) to do what you want them to do or to stop doing what you don't want them to do.  According to Keyser Soze [the Usual Suspects], "The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist."  The greatest trick a parent ever learns is how to distract their children.

Here are a few examples:

1) I previously mentioned that I often use "The Big Baby Bath Theory" to accomplish cutting my son's nails.  If he's not already crying, my only option to keep it that way while cutting his nails is to distract him.  Usually, a pacifier will get the job done.  Same baby, same nails, same clippers - without the pacifier he's crying. With the pacifier, he could care less that I'm cutting his nails (and diverts far more attention to finding if that's Phineas and Ferb on the TV).

2) My son Clark is not a big fan of "Tummy Time (T-Time)." After a few minutes he'll start crying.  Since the "experts" say T-Time is so important, I needed to find a way to get him to put more time into it.  So, I distract the hell out of him.  There's plush toys, rattles, pillows, a motion activated music player, mirrors and of course his pacifier all on the mat with him for distraction.  He went from 2 or 3 minutes to about 30 straight minutes of T-Time with no tears.

3) Plan on taking young children on a long car trip?  You better bring iPods, smart phone apps, portable DVD players, coloring books and anything else you can think of that will keep them distracted in the back seat. Distractions will keep the cabin of the car free of "I'm bored" and "Are we there yet?"