Foods and supplements that will help your child poop | How to avoid baby and toddler constipation

Foods and supplements that will help your child poop | How to avoid baby and toddler constipation

Constipation sucks. Am I right? It can put a strain on the entire family, see what I did there, strain…constipation. I make myself laugh. Rule number one, when it comes to constipation, is that you cannot make your child poop. When you’re trying to make them poop, you’re trying to force something that their body physically cannot do right now and it’s going to cause tension across the entire board, the entire day, and the entire family. So, I’m going to teach you different ways to help your child not be constipated.

Foods and supplements that will help your child poop | How to avoid baby and toddler constipation

Potty training should be stress-free and fun. You have to make sure that your child is ready, because if they’re not ready it’s going to be more difficult and they are going to begin withholding their poop. We want your child to be excited about this new big transition and this big milestone in their life. If you want a step-by-step guide on how to potty train, grab my potty training guide. 

Now let’s jump into constipation, whether your child is constipated already or you just want to avoid constipation, their nutrition is going to play a huge role in constipation or any poop. It’s all going to come down to what you eat, obviously what goes in has to come out. This leads me to saying, you don’t want to be feeding your child too much-processed food. You want to make sure that your child has a high fat diet; good fats are good, so feed your kids high fat foods. Give them avocados, whole milk, and those kinds of things that are going to give your children that high quality fat. 

You also want to make sure that you are giving your child fruits and vegetables. I know vegetables are hard, throw the spinach in a smoothie and or popsicles, to help them learn to love fruits and vegetables. Another thing that you can put in your child’s smoothie are chia seeds; chia seeds make you poop. Pears, apples, kiwi, and watermelon, all of those fruits that are going to help your child’s poop stay soft. Things like watermelon and cucumbers are going to keep your child hydrated so that their poop is not getting hard. 

The next category of things that you can do to either prevent or get rid of constipation, are supplements. I have to say the disclaimer, I’m not a doctor, so if you want to give your child any supplements then run it by your pediatrician first.  There’s a magnesium supplement introducing calm gummies. I love these! I take these and my kids take these, and they’re good for so many different things. Another thing that I personally use is Seed, there’s an adult version and they do have a children’s version that just came out. So I do recommend giving this to your child, if they are old enough. Probiotics are proven to help your digestive system, so definitely look into this and of course ask your doctor. 

You also want to make sure that if your child is on an iron supplement, that you’re keeping a really close eye on their bowel movements, because the more iron your child needs to take, the more constipated they’re going to get. You want to make sure that you’re increasing all of those fatty foods and all of the other digestive supplements, not iron supplements. 

One more thing that I want to tell you, is that you should not potty train your child while they are constipated. If they’re constipated because they’re stressed out or have a fear of pooping, you don’t want to throw them in the trenches and start potty training. Once your child’s constipation issue is fully cleared and they’re pooping like a champ, then you can definitely potty train your child in a week or less, and make sure you grab my potty training guide!

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Missy Yandow

Pediatric Sleep Consultant

Potty Training Coach