Constipation - are laxatives the answer?

[Gecko]

My daughter who is now 16 months and is on laxatives. At age of 6 months she used to have a terrible time, pulling her hair , scratching herself etc So much so that she would hold on for 2-3 days whereby now the pooh became very hard and painful to pass. The paeditrician prescribed 10mls of latulose in the morning and then 5 ml lactulose and 5 ml Senna in the evening. It has helped - we have had a couple of days where she holds it in but it has got better

What I am interested to know if they are parents whose child has had this problem and the effect of the laxatives on the child long term?

Secondly Is there am alternative?

my ds is on 10mls of lactulose twice a day and 5mls of senna at night, we saw the paed on saturday to make sure there wasn't anything else ausing the problem ( there wasn't) and he reccomended we keep ds on this dosage as long as it's working for up to 6 months to really knock the problem on the head. No problems with long term use of either of these. We have tried alternatives prune juice etc but this seems to be the only thing that works. Theres another relly good thread on constipation if you do a search. HTH.

Forgot to say he is 15m and has problems since 10m