Drugging the kids to sleep... - Page 3

[Virginia Mom]

Originally Posted by Sancta

Does anyone here use Hyland's Calms Forte to help their kids sleep? I use it very rarely - in the past when ds was teething badly to help him sleep better, and now because the kids have colds and are napping so much during the day they're restless at night. It seems to work well, but whenever I drop the little "pill" into their mouths, I always feel guilty - like I'm sedating them or drugging them or something.

This stuff IS safe, right? Anyone else use this occasionally? It's okay, right? Or am I just a bad mom? :

Hi, we use tons of Hylands........Calms Forte for Kids (but usually when travelling)...we have also used the Chamomile for teething as well as the teething combo .............

but like anohter mom said, always go with your gut....if you aren't comfortable try an alternative........you can call the Hylands Nurse (number on the back of the bottle) or even try a chamomile tea for the kids...that might work too

good luck
FYI: as for safety with hylands...a friend of mine,her kid ate half a bottle of the stuff by accident.....according to hylands, it would take two or more bottles for there to be a problem......

hope that helps.

[milkybean]

Originally Posted by Sancta

Ideas? Both my kids fight sleep like some wouldn't believe. That night ds was teething, we were up till 3 am - rocking, singing, walking, pacing, bouncing, snuggling, but he was hurting so badly he just couldn't shut off the pain long enough to fall asleep. Maybe I should have used Tylenol then? Nah - I really didn't want to. Poor guy, though, perhaps I should have.

As someone who had sleeping issues that were just part of my Being, and now I don't, I would highly recommend visiting with a homeopath and getting them their individual constitutional remedy. That way you don't have to use it as "first aid", but help them completely.

Originally Posted by Logan's Mom

I think they are natural, safe and for us the teething tablets seem to be somewhat effective, when the pain isn't too great I'm guessing -- helps take the edge off.

Safe and useful oh yes, but I have a hard time calling them natural. When you start looking at the ingredients in some of them, bleah. Oscillococcinum is particularly BLEAH. (and that one is never effective for me anyway b/c I never go out and spend the big bucks on it at the beginning of illnesses, LOL, especially b/c it takes me a few days to get OK with what it's derived from)

Originally Posted by jenrose

Homeopathics are *very* safe for little kids.

To give you an idea, at one point I had a collection of homeopathic remedies of approximately 25 tubes. My daughter was four, and a friend was over, a six year old, really old enough to know better, but a troubled little girl, and she found the homeopathics when she snuck into my bedroom (where the girls were not allowed to play) and she ate them all. :

That's right, she ate $140 worth of homeopathics, the equivalent of maybe 750 doses (yes, that's right, seven HUNDRED doses), thinking they were candy.

The only negative side effect? I didn't allow her to come over to our house again for three months--that was a LOT of money to lose. But I was not worried for a second about toxicity issues, and there were none.

Well, she probably woudln't have been able to USE those remedies for any issues she might have had.

DS sucked down a tube of chamomile, and for the next year chamomile didn't work for him. Made him HYPER like you wouldn't believe. Slowly the "proving" of the remedy wore off, and we could use it again every so often, but not for that year after eating the whole tube!

Originally Posted by awinkler

Some people think that homeopathic remedies are no more effective than a placebo, so from that point of view, the calms forte is akin to a sugar pill. (http://nccam.nih.gov/health/homeopathy/, http://www.quackwatch.org/01Quackery...ics/homeo.html, http://arstechnica.com/articles/cult...homeopathy.ars)

Silly Americans.

Isn't homeopathy used more than western medicines in some European countries?

But ya know, even if it were a placebo...if something WORKS, wouldn't you prefer a sugar pill over whatever is in all those other things???? When a placebo of any kind works, it should humiliate the makers of "real" drugs!!!

Originally Posted by JenMidwife

I know that can happen w/ Benadryl (Diphenhydramine). Something like 90% of people become drowsy w/ it, but 10% become hyper

Things like that are quite often made with corn syrup, and often even high fructose corn syrup, and from my son's experience, I would bet $100 that's what causes most of the opposite reactions people have.

Our dentist, who is normally a good person, got nervous b/c DS was overly excited during the very first visit when he was in the big shared room (instead of the closed-door room he was in the first 3 visits). INsisted we use a prescription benadryl-like medicine. I complied b/c I wasn't thinking, and the stuff never calmed him down, and as a matter of fact he got so hyped up he started freaking out a few hours after the dose. He was good during the visit, b/c he trusts the dentist and knows that the dentist is helping him, but before and after the appt he was a hellion, which only happens when he's "on" corn syrup.


Homeopathics don't have corn syrup (though, hmm, there could be a remedy derived from it...that would be interesting).

[happy2bamama]

We have used the teething tablets almost every night since DS was around 10 months or so (that's when he started getting teeth). He has always been one of those babies that has a really hard time with teething. Never was one to just wake up and have a new tooth - we always knew when one was on the way and it would take months to come through. We have used Tylenol about three times for when he was clearly in severe pain and couldn't deal. I always felt torn about using it because I don't use anything like that for myself, but I also didn't think it was fair to let him just deal with the pain in these really bad cases. Now that DS is older (22 months), he handles the teething so much better, so we don't dole out the teething tablets like we used to, but it's been pretty frequent lately as he has his finger in his mouth all day and is getting his canines, poor guy. I don't feel bad about using the teething tablets because IMO, it's the safest thing to help him relax and to take the edge off (next to breastmilk, that is - which he still gets ). I can't imagine what it must feel like to have teeth CONSTANTLY pushing through your gums for two years on top of learning how to be a human being in this world (crawling, walking, eating, talking, etc...).

[Pumpkin_Pie]

Yep. Did it last night. After two nights in a row of 2+ hours of screaming to sleep, I gave DS some Hylands and *gasp!* Tylenol last night before bed. No screaming to sleep, his teeth got a rest (he is cutting 4 canines right now) and we both got sleep.

[tbone_kneegrabber]

I was thinking about getting calms forte for travel and now I think I will.

I have also given ds "sleepytime tea" cooled down in a sippy cup, or by syringe (he prefers it by syringe, because he's werid!)

[Nolamom]

Originally Posted by Sancta

Ideas? Both my kids fight sleep like some wouldn't believe. That night ds was teething, we were up till 3 am - rocking, singing, walking, pacing, bouncing, snuggling, but he was hurting so badly he just couldn't shut off the pain long enough to fall asleep. Maybe I should have used Tylenol then? Nah - I really didn't want to. Poor guy, though, perhaps I should have.

Sorry to hijack, but wondering why you didn't use tylenol... am I missing something? DS had TERRIBLE teething pain, too. Tylenol was the only thing that relieved it. We used it sparingly, but I was glad the option was there. It was so hard to watch my LO suffer, I can't imagine choosing not to use it.

[*Erin*]

the title of this thread made me think of some children that i cared for one time when i was a teenager-a girl who was 22 months and her sister, 6 months. They spent the night at my family's home, and neither one slept all night because their mother gave them nyquil almost nightly and they were addicted she actually left the bottle and told me to give it to them. i most certainly did not.

ot

anyway, hylands is NOT a drug like nyquil! i give my dd calms forte sometimes if she's restless after a busy day or something is stressing her and she can't settle in to sleep. i used to give it to her when she was a tot, too.

i take it myself sometimes. It works for us both.

[Mel*APMomma]

I don't even give my son tylenol unless he REALLY needs it.I have given him hylands on a few occasions when he was in obvious pain/discomfort from teething but never would I give him anything to make him sleep. Same goes for my daughter.

[JenMidwife]

Originally Posted by Mel*APMomma

I don't even give my son tylenol unless he REALLY needs it.I have given him hylands on a few occasions when he was in obvious pain/discomfort from teething but never would I give him anything to make him sleep. Same goes for my daughter.

Well since Hylands is homeopathic & by nature homeo barely has anything in it, I would use Hylands in a heartbeat over Tylenol. I don't have a problem w/ Tylenol or Motrin & do give them to my child occasionally for pain (I absolutely give them for teething pain), but for a restless nights, I think it's totally safe to give kids Hylands.

In fact, I respectfully think the title of this thread is a bit of a misnomer & kind of inflammatory... I don't think most people who are educated about homeopathics consider them to be drugs. Just my 2 cents

[Anastasiya]

Originally Posted by JenMidwife

In fact, I respectfully think the title of this thread is a bit of a misnomer & kind of inflammatory... I don't think most people who are educated about homeopathics consider them to be drugs. Just my 2 cents

But if you'd read the whole thread, you would have seen that at the time I didn't understand homeopathics - and it FELT like that's exactly what I was doing - drugging them. So with that in mind, no, it's not inflammatory. It's the way I saw it at the time.

[Anastasiya]

Originally Posted by Nolamom

Sorry to hijack, but wondering why you didn't use tylenol... am I missing something? DS had TERRIBLE teething pain, too. Tylenol was the only thing that relieved it. We used it sparingly, but I was glad the option was there. It was so hard to watch my LO suffer, I can't imagine choosing not to use it.

I didn't use it for him mostly because, while I knew it would take away his pain, Tylenol also keeps him up all night. I have no idea why - he's still like that. If he ever needs Tylenol for anything, it wires him.

[JenMidwife]

Originally Posted by Sancta

But if you'd read the whole thread, you would have seen that at the time I didn't understand homeopathics - and it FELT like that's exactly what I was doing - drugging them. So with that in mind, no, it's not inflammatory. It's the way I saw it at the time.

Gotcha & I never meant that you were being inflammatory, just that someone could see the title of the thread, not read the whole thing & then jump all over people for drugging their kids to sleep... which none of us advocate.

[tankgirl73]

I wish I could find gentler ways to help DS to calm down and get to sleep... he's no toddler, though! Our toddler, we're doing okay with... we have some rough nights... she's a late bedtime gal, but we're getting through.

My 10yo though is a different story. I've tried homeopathics, I've tried the Calms Forte. I'll come right out and say that I'm in the camp that believes homeopathy is a well-orchestrated placebo that some people are making tons of money off of. Interestingly, I was just reading an article today about how half of American doctors admit to prescribing placebos to their patients without their knowledge, and how the research shows how strong the placebo effect is, and -- get this -- the more expensive the placebo, the better it works!

So I'm not poopooing the placebo effect... if it works, it works! But I don't, personally, for a moment believe that the body works the way the homeopaths would have us believe.

But, I tried it. I have been wrong about many things in the past, and upon trying them, convinced myself that I'd been wrong all along. EC, for instance. Tried it as a total skeptic, figuring it couldn't hurt. Now I'm a total EC evangelist.

With the same state of mind, we tried the homeopathics - at the worst, it couldn't hurt, and hey I might even be wrong. Allergy stuff for DH's hay fever and exzema. Calms Forte and other remedies for DS's hyperactivity. Candida for myself, other supposed gut-healing remedies.

Zilch, zero, nada on all counts. You might blame my skepticism, but honestly, if you have to 'believe' in a remedy for it to work, then it's not the remedy itself that's doing the remedying... And DS went in with a youthful, open mind. I didn't tell him anything about homeopathy vs. allopathic blah blah, just said here's some stuff to take.

ANYWAY. We've resorted to melatonin for DS and it works. He goes to sleep at a decent hour and we've seen noticeable improvement in his daytime attentiveness and focus. I'd long suspected he wasn't sleeping well. My only worry is that he's becoming dependent on it... but we'll deal with that when we need to. For now, it works.

We'd tried cuddles, quiet music, white noise, meditation CD's, different bedtimes (earlier and later), let him set his own bedtime, all the tricks and tips. I was always insomniac as a child, he probably just gets it from me.

[Virginia Mom]

So I'm not poopooing the placebo effect... if it works, it works! But I don't, personally, for a moment believe that the body works the way the homeopaths would have us believe.

I just had to share in response to your message ........Two years ago I was diagnosed with chronic lyme disease, after six months of meds and then developing severe allergic reactions to most everything used to "control" lyme and babesia, my doctors (three of them) were at a loss....it's only been thru my homeopath that my lyme is finally in remission...something that couldn't be done with antiobiotics ---and it's been about 8 months of being symptom free.

Homeopathy is not a placebo. Just like all "medications" you have to find the right one.

Thanks.

[blue butterfly]

i use it sparingly with dds (5 & 2) when they've had a crazy day in which i can see that they are going to have a hard time settling in for the night.