Video transcript

Kelda (mother of Rory): Although Rory took to the boob really well he’s not taking to solids very well at all. He’s reacting to the most basic of the solids, like apples, pretty much all fruit, especially the more acidic the fruit the more he gets a reaction and his ear goes red and he gets a rash down to his mouth almost instantly. I possibly tried too many things early on, close together, I don’t know if that added to his reaction or not.

But now I’m just introducing sort of one thing at a time and doing it all very slowly so hopefully he’ll get over it soon.

Adam (father of Elly): With our child she, we found out with a lot of her poos they were actually quite runny and smelly and they were basically because she became dairy intolerant there for a while.

Dr Con James (consultant paediatrician and father of four): Babies have a condition called lactose intolerance and in many cases that’s physiological and normal. And what happens is they don’t quite have enough of the lactase enzyme to break down lactose. Now lactose exists not only in cow’s milk products, it doesn’t exist in soy milk, but it does in cow’s milk, but it also exists in breastmilk. And so babies who have sloppy yellow watery poos, they’ve almost always got a degree of lactose intolerance which for most babies is totally normal, it’s not something you need to treat in a happy content baby. If it’s burning the backside because of the acid that’s coming out, sometimes you have to make some dietary changes.

Narrator: Most young babies will bring back up a little bit of breastmilk or formula after a feed because the top of their stomach isn’t mature enough to hold it down. Sometimes that’s called spitting up or reflux.

Mother: With the reflux he didn’t actually throw up or vomit, but he kept it, it came up, up to here probably and it just made it very painful, so you know he would be screaming all day basically.

Dr James: A child who vomits, usually that means that’s a bit of reflux, but in the majority of children who have reflux they don’t need treatment, because if a child vomits a few times a day and is thriving and is happy then there is no reason to treat it. You would never ever consider giving medication for that. Then there is the child who actually vomits and has pain, or the one that has pain even without the vomiting they do this and they swallow and it goes down again, you just know, and that’s associated with the screaming, that’s the type of reflux, gastro-oesophageal reflux and heartburn, that needs treatment. Reflux is very common and mostly it doesn’t need treatment.