While some shy away from talking about going #2, we go as far as to celebrate poop! Parents know better than anyone that when it comes to constipation and irregular bowel movements it can be uncomfortable, upsetting and stressful for kids.

How Do I Know If My Child Has Chronic Constipation?

Chronic constipation is infrequent bowel movements or difficulty passing stools that persists for several weeks or longer, with some children suffering for years. Generally, constipation is described as having less than three bowel movements per week. 

While occasional constipation is a more common health condition in kids, chronic constipation can significantly reduce the quality of life that a child is able to experience. 

Most of the time children with this condition suffer from near-daily bouts of fatigue, malaise, nausea, exhaustion, emotional dysregulation and even focus or behavior problems. 

What’s more is that the most common medication prescribed to treat children with chronic constipation, Miralax, has a host of nasty side effects with behavior challenges and mood swings being commonly reported. 

Traditional signs and symptoms of chronic constipation can vary from child to child but they can include:

• Passing fewer than three stools a week

• Belly (abdominal) bloating, cramps or pain

• Not feeling hungry

• Passing hard, lumpy or dry stools

• Straining and feeling pain during bowel movements

• Feeling like there is a blockage or restriction in your rectum

What Are the Common Causes of Chronic Constipation?

Normally a food moves through the large intestines (or “the colon”) and the colon absorbs water while it makes stool. Muscle movements (contractions) push the stool throughout the digestive tract and by the time it’s ready to be eliminated most of the water will have been soaked up. But when the colon’s muscle movements are too slow, this makes the stool move through the colon too slowly. Consequently, the colon absorbs too much water and the stool gets really hard and dry. 

Once a child becomes constipated the problem can quickly get worse. Hard, dry stools can be painful to push out. So the child may stop using the bathroom because it hurts. Over time, the colon will not be able to sense that stool is there and a cycle begins.

As with any digestive problem, the first place parents tend to turn is to diet and nutrition. Most parents and even providers assume that there are some foods that their child is allergic or intolerant (has difficulty digesting) to, and some nutrients or key physiological elements they are missing. 

Therefore the first things that get the blame for chronic constipation are things like: 

• Gluten and dairy intolerance

• Not enough fiber or magnesium 

• Lack of probiotics and digestive enzymes

But the fact that over 90% of the parents we meet whose children have chronic constipation have already tried every diet change, added magnesium/probiotics/medications, tried essential oils and more. But yet their child still struggles. 

That begs the question, is there something more going on? When you’ve tried everything for your child and it doesn’t move the needle or if there is no lasting change, something different might be at play – a neurological problem. 

The single most important element of our digestive health is actually not a diet, it’s motility (movement). No matter what foods are going in, our digestive system is made up of nerves and muscles that work in coordination to move things along and provide what we call “primary functions” in chiropractic.  

The first role the nervous system plays in digestion is recognizing what nutrients are wanted and needed, and it assimilates and absorbs those. From there, it then also recognizes what are toxic and potentially harmful components of the food, and it eliminates and excretes those. However, that final crucial step to digestive health and well-being can’t happen if the neurological control of the smooth muscles that make up the digestive tract are interfered with and motility is slowed down or stopped altogether. 

That is the #1 most common finding we see as the primary cause of constipation in our patients – that the motility (known as peristalsis) is interfered with and malfunctioning. In chiropractic, interference and dysfunction are known as subluxation.

How To Care For Kids With Chronic Constipation

This is where the amazing simplicity of Pediatric Chiropractic comes into play! We simply focus entirely on finding what causes chronic constipation and addressing it first. 

This is first done by taking a thorough case history, and really looking at all the stressors a child may have been exposed to early in life, as well as all the various treatments and care options a family has tried already. We frequently find things like birth trauma and intervention (c-section, forceps, vacuum extraction, induction, long labor times, etc.) as well as reflux, colic, and indigestion in the early stages of the case history. 

Then from there, the most important thing is to run a set of INSiGHT Subluxation Scans on your child to find exactly how that autonomic and central nervous system ( the “control center”) is functioning. Below is an example of the most common Insight Scan finding we see correlated with chronic constipation.

The red bars at the very bottom of the scan, in the lumbosacral region of the NeuroSpinal System, indicate a significant subluxation in that area. That exact region is the most commonly correlated area of subluxation in chronic constipation cases, so much so that Pediatric Chiropractors have come to call it the “poop button” and it’s the first place we look upon examination!

Schedule Your Consultation & Exam Today

Our experienced pediatric chiropractors at Sprout Family Chiropractic are trained to look deeper into the function of the nervous system so your child’s gut and digestive tract can work at it’s best, naturally.

Your child was made to heal and be healthy. Don’t give up hope! Schedule a consultation & exam today.

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