During the first months of life in a baby who is breast-fed, stool after every meal is the norm. If the baby cannot go to the toilet more than once a day, it is considered that he has constipation. In addition to rare bowel movements, symptoms of chronic constipation are a lack of appetite, stomach pain, and weight loss. The volume of the stool increases significantly.
In the vast majority of cases, babies cannot go to the toilet due to impaired motility - intestinal motility. There may be several reasons for this:
- Atonic constipation. This type of disease is determined by such signs as bloating and large amounts of feces (a baby’s stool may resemble an adult’s stool in volume). All this is due to insufficient contractile activity of the intestine. Forcing a child to defecate means fixing the pathology and strengthening his negative attitude to the process.
- Spastic constipation. Unlike the previous version, it occurs due to increased contractile activity of the digestive tract. The following symptoms indicate spastic constipation: high stool density and sharp pain during bowel movements.
- If for a long period of time a month-old baby does not poop, and when defecating, the stool has a ribbon shape, this may indicate various pathologies of the rectum. In this case, you must immediately show the baby to the surgeon.
If the baby cannot go to the toilet, the problem can be not only a violation of the intestines. The likelihood of a disease such as rickets should be taken into account - it is quite common in northern latitudes. From constipation are regularly tormented by children on artificial feeding.
Your newborn baby is not pooping? The first thing to do is to completely review the diet. You must be completely sure that the baby is eating to the full. Try offering him a little more food. If this does not help, start injecting sour-milk complementary foods.
Before each meal, briefly lay the baby on the stomach - this helps strengthen the abdominal muscles. As often as possible, massage the tummy with light circular movements, apply a warm heating pad. The more motor activity the baby shows, the better. After eating, be sure to bathe the baby , after that do not wrap it in a diaper. Well, if the bathing procedure will be accompanied by a little exercise and massage.
What to do if the baby cannot go to the toilet for more than two days? This is a rather alarming symptom. Try to give the baby an enema, but not from warm water - the liquid should be at room temperature (toxins accumulated in the intestines in the warm water dissolve, which facilitates their further absorption into the blood). For a baby younger than one month, an enema of 30 ml is taken; at the age of one to three months - 40 ml; older than six months - 90 ml. To facilitate the procedure, the anal passage of the child can be lubricated with vegetable oil.
If constipation is repeated regularly, but the consistency of the stool is soft, Dufalac helps well. The medicine is taken by the course: twice a day for ten days.
Even if any of the means described above helped, be sure to notify the local pediatrician and continue to follow his recommendations.