2.5 year old refusing to take medicine

[Morcerf]

Our daughter has an ear infection and has been prescribed some antibiotics (the yellow stuff).

She is flatly refusing to take it. We’ve tried from a spoon, mixed with drink, in a syrings, holding her down. Nothing works.

Also tried offering a treat if she takes it and that’s not working either.

Does anyone have any other ideas? She’s at an age where she’s able to resist forcing it down her but not yet able to reason with her.

I cannot offer any advice only my sympathy and will listen to the others with interest. We have been in the same position with my 3 yo - mixing, bribery (chocolate, cartoons)- nothing works. Holding down will only make him vomit everything out as soon as the medicine (any medicine) hits the mouth. Will vomit even when voluntary agreed to take it a few times, so clearly has some strong aversion to the taste. Ended up getting paracetamol suppositories from GP as could not bring the temperature down - not an option for you with antibiotics though. Maybe getting the drug in the form of tablets, crushing them and mixing with something like cereal where the taste is not immediately obvious might work (but it is unlikely that GP will prescribe it like that)? We did it with probiotics after the norovirus infection and mine did not notice the clumps in the food.
Hope you'll come up with a solution that works.

I never resolved this with DS, he puked up the yellow banana antibiotics as soon as it went down.

He was prescribed a clear strawberry flavoured liquid one when he had scarlet fever though and he took that OK. Maybe ring the Dr and ask if there's an alternative available?

Mix it in a small petit filous yogurt and make no mention of it, it's a smaller quantity than putting it into a drink and the strawberry flavour covers it well, my ds takes them fine now but when he was about 18 months he wouldn't and that's how we got around it.

After all the Bribery pleading ect.. which I found built up the anxiety of it, I just took to hiding medicine filled syringe, picking dds up and squirting it in to the cheek.

It’s not very Mary Poppins but they need it to feel better. It’s usually followed by a drink with a straw or a sugar fee jelly pot.

I put in syringe , hold child firmly and squirt a tiny bit at a time in until all gone, treat afterwards

I hide my sons in little bottles of juice they are the alien ones he likes and then pretend to open it it front of him so he does not know it's there

We used to force it down. Took two of us - one to hold down flailing limbs and the second to hold nose and squirt syringe. Not fun but necessary at the time - he had hideous ear infections.

DS will take calpol but not neurofen - we hide that in ice cream and he has no problem wolfing it down then! Good luck with this, it's horrible when they're poorly 😞

‘Hiding’ medicine in food isn’t really recommended but I do understand if it is a last resort. You need to be firm and just get the medicine in. Funnily enough we get a lot of parents at the hospital telling us their child just won’t take the medicine. 99 times out of 100 we can get it in them

A syringe of sugar water first (only a little sugar) followed by the medicine

Ubercorns why is it not recommended? Genuine question. We had to take my DS to hospital (after GP sent us) because he ended up so ill he wouldn't eat/drink so was getting dehydrated. Two nurses and me and DH held him down to get the neurofen in him and shortly after that he happily had milk, so now we hide it to stop him from getting to that stage.

There are 2 probs with hiding medicine in food. One is that some medicines work best on an empty stomach. The more major one is that, if the food is only partially eaten, the child won't have had the full dosage which can be quite dangerous for things like antibiotics.

My son is two and we had a battle with the anti-biotics last month. The only thing that worked was yoghurt, we put it on the top of the yoghurt and lightly mixed it in to the top layer so we knew he would get it all before he got bored of it.