Constipated baby - any tips?

[IMissSleep]

My little boy is very constipated, straining till nearly blue in the face!!

He is 6 months and on 3 solid meals a day and 3- 4 bottles. Plus 4-5 oz of water. I have tried to give him more water and gripe water.

The straining is making him sick the poor thing. Has anyone got any tips? I've lifted his legs to try and help him but nothing!
Any advice will help :)

My ds1 became very constipated when he was a baby.
I ended up taking him to the gp who gave supositery's (god knows how to spell it) which I had to insert into him for a few days.
She then told me if I couldn't get him to drink water, I'd have to give him squash...........don't know if that's the best advice, but that's what I did.

Btw, hope he gets better soon, poor boy, must be very uncomfortable for him

Thank you! I think I will take him to the doc. He's managed to go :O but still very constipated!
Fingers crossed he sorts himself out, feel so helpless.

I know, it's horrid to see them like that isn't it?
What about trying some prune juice? I don't know if it's ok to give such a young baby something like that........maybe go to docs and ask them incase it ever happens again.

Hi,
My DD suffered like this as a baby (still does now and again but not too much thankfully!)It started at about 4weeks old and my HV advised lots of water at first but then some fresh orange juice (very very very diluted as she was soooooo young!!)and finally prune juice.
The prune juice was the only thing that worked!when we started weaning we also made sure she had some pureed prunes to eat every couple of days too......she hated them really so we had to mix them with other pureed friut but they definately did their job!!
Another friut that helped her was cherries!!

Something else we did was switch her milk to aptamil comfort digest (she also had a mild dose of colic) and that stuff worked wonders too!!

Good luck xx

Kiwi fruit always gets DS moving.

And until he's back to normal avoid bananas as they clog you up a bit.

Couple of oz of warm water with some brown sugar, literally the tip of a teaspoon. Worked brilliantly!

Oooh, poor little guy.

You can buy baby lax, or something like that name in the pharmacy. Its a suppository and works very quickly.

I really found that the prune juice was the best ongoing 'treatment' in preventing a back up of painfully constipated faeces.

For us, it wasn't until our little constipated baby was up and walking about that the constipation went away. She would be in agony for days, do a little piece, and then back to straining, etc for days.

It was a friend who is a paediatric nurse who suggested a half water, half prune juice daily for a week, followed by one quarter prune juice, etc everyday thereafter.

Thanks for the advice, he's managed to go and is sleeping now.
The last 2 nights I have been up every hour with him. I suspect he had a tummy ache :( Here's hoping I get a good nights sleep and so does he!!
Seemed a lot happier when he went to bed. Will see how the next few days go :)

we had awful awful problems with that as soon as we started DD on solids at nearly six months. i was told this was fairly common when starting solids. she wouldn't go for days and then would scream so much it was heartbreaking. all the advice i got helped to a degree - avoid bananas, make sure there is the right balance in the diet between fluids and solids (plenty of fluis, basically, and make pures quite runny as well) ; make sure the formula consistency is not too thick if you are bottle-feeding; give plenty of fibre. For us, steamed pear puree really helped (for a while she just had that as solids!!) and also pureed prunes - i would boil the prunes and then puree them and use the water in which they boiled to make the puree very very diluted, like juice. i stopped baby rice and did fewer baby cereals for a while too. Then we had another bad bad bout while on holiday in France and we got these amazing things which you stick in the bottom and squeeze out (not sure if it is the same as a suppositary - i will see if i can find one around to tell you what's in it) - and it worked like magic without any discomfort!! i am not sure you get them over here though. if it's not too bad and you can cope without medicines up the bottom - just make sure you do lots of runny fruit purees (pear is especially good) and perhaps go slightly lighter on solids and shift towards fluids and milk a bit, temporarily. they do grow out of it fairly quickly - DD's problems just disappeared after a month or two, without any obvious reasons.

DD was the same when first weaned, gp prescribed lactulose, basically a sugar solution, which worked wonders and she grew out of the problem after a month or two. See GP.