To force him to take it?

[poorlykid]

My 3.5 year old needs a course of penicillin. He had one this afternoon and it tasted bad and now is in melt down refusing to have the next lot!
I've got to give him it 4 times a day for 10 days!
I really really don't want to force him to take it but how am I supposed to get him to take it?! Any ideas? Help!

We do bribery at home - probably cos I'm too knackered to force it down them 4 year old. Sticker chart and cinema trip at the end of the course of medication worked for the last prescription. But it helps if there's something on at the cinema they really want to watch.
Friend of mine (doctor) just forces it down her little ones by holding their nose, but she's stronger willed than me and she says she seen some horrors in A and E.

Patsy many GPs will not prescribe something else just because a child may not like it. They prescribe the cheapest option that fights the infection presenting. If that means my six year old needs to get a grip of his nose and have medication that tastes grim then so be it. If it means pinning down my autistic ten year old because his tonsils are threatening to demand their own room, then pin him down I will.

My eldest hates the taste of most liquid medicines, but as she has a nasty gag reflex she makes do and has a fizzy drink ready for every go because it’s better than throwing up three times a day and wasting a course of medication.

Sometimes you do just have to force the drugs down, as unpleasant as it seems. It’s much better to teach a child that the shitty tasting medicine does a job and is a momentary unpleasantness than to bring them up to argue the toss over ingredients with every doctor they ever see (allergies excepted of course).

I don't understand why you wouldn't give a child medicine if they needed to take it.
It may be horrible if they really do not want to take it, but sometimes you just have to grit your teeth and make them! It's for their own good.
Age 3 and a HALF?! They don't know what's good for them at that age. It's your job as a parent to give them the medicine, even if they hate it.

We’re currently mixing with honey and it’s wlrlimg. Tastes awful!

at tjr...is that funny. it wouldnt be in my house. i wouldnt administer that.wow

I agree incy, going back to the gp asking for alternative nicer tasting ABs shouldn't be promoted as an option. It's a massive strain on NHS resources and there's no guarantee a child will find a second (or third!) prescription any more palatable.

Different antibiotics are used to target different infections so there isn't a huge choice anyway, or the alternative may be less effective.

I give ds his awful tasting medicine in chocolate milk. It was the only way of getting him to have it.

It's worth bearing in mind that some antibiotics should not be taken with milk. These are the Tetracycline antibiotics; commonly used to treat UTIs and chest infections. The milk will stop this type of AB being absorbed properly into the blood stream.

Other forms of antibiotic such as Amoxicillin are fine mixed with milk.

Here we go again! 😭

Lovemusic you're right, you can take the risk of not having anti-biotics, but you're risking further disability. I have a child with autism too and we hide all the drugs he has to take in watered down mango and passion fruit smoothie. I worry that this will put him off his favourite drink (hard to get him to drink enough), but it's worked so far and he has to take a cocktail of stuff everyday.

It's Phenoxymethylpenicillin - is that ok with milk?

Tolerable (and tjr) - I've done that and suppositories are a great way to administer medicine to a child who can't keep anything down. (Painkillers but not antibiotics). Baby/child suppositories are very small and made of a slippery waxy material, pop them in and they work fast :-) But when I asked for them in the UK the pharmacist was

Phenoxymethylpenicillin is fine to mix with milk. It's just the tetracycline ABs that you can't mix as the calcium in milk binds those antibiotics preventing gut absorbtion. They'll usually have cycline in the name eg doxycycline, oxytetracycline.

I won't bore you with the science!
Hope you're having better success with his medicine. Don't feel guilty about forcing him. I find it better to get the ordeal of taking it over with as quickly as possible rather than dragging it out with lots of cajoling.

Bribing him with cola sounds like a good plan

Some children are more compliant than others. Just because a child is ill, it doesn’t make it suddenly acceptable to use physical force. Older children can be very good at resisting. Of course I wouldn’t want my dc to need IV antibiotics but I couldn’t physically restrain my dc and force medicine down their throats thirty or forty times. This is my dc: other families may be different and other children may be more cooperative.

Fortunately my dd will take tablets, and now she is over 6, most medicines are available in tablet form. If she hadn’t cooperated with tablets I would have asked for suppositories but fortunately we didn’t reach that point.

I remember having to have "banana flavour" antibiotics as a child. It was absolutely vile stuff, it literally made me gag trying to swallow the stuff. I was old enough to know how important it was to take it, and did my absolute level best to down the stuff but my body rejected it each time I tried to swallow.

You have my sympathies.

Have you got a syringe?

Zzzzz we haven’t walked a mile in each other’s shoes . I can quite see why many people on this thread have used a variety of techniques to get their children to take medicine. I am describing my situation with my dc, where I realised that I was unable to force my child to take medicine by reasonable and proportionate means. As I said, I’m fortunate that she is able to swallow tablets.

I’ve Always been good at taking medication. In primary 6 I got tonsillitis and was given liquid penicillin. It was a red liquid that smelled really fruity and nice but dear god it tasted foul. I remember dreading doses and trying to force it down that was almost 30 years ago and I still remember how disgusting it was 🤮🤢

I had this experience with my 3.5 year old. First course was banana 🍌 amoxicillin and we failed miserably despite being very persistent. It also meant our child refused Calpol etc due to bad association. I managed one dose and thankfully it was viral. So, asked GP for an alternative next time. Clarithromycin (sp) was fantastic. It was only 2 doses per day and smelt like sherbet. This was much more successful. Of course it depends what sort of infection they are treating.

I totally agree that children need to learn to take medicine. However, even a toddler can just spit it all out then be screaming and very distressed at the prospect of another dose. I think the alternative one we had was still not pleasant, but enabled us to give it positively and give reward (eg sticker chart etc), plus keep reinforcing that the medicine was helping them feel better.