Infant Tylenol: Do you know what’s in this stuff?

Meredith Magee Donnelly

It’s tricky being a first-time mom. Amongst solicited (and unsolicited) advice you have to figure out what you believe in and what is best for your kid. So when my pediatrician recommended Infant Tylenol as a cure-all for pain we gave it to Quinn without thinking twice. Slowly I started getting a hunch that tylenol was actually keeping Quinn awake. Yes, it seemed to help with the pain, but he could not fall asleep whenever we gave it to him. In the back of my mind I remembered a colleague telling me about her daughter who had a sensitivity to food dye (she would go bonkers whenever she consumed it). With this in mind we switched to dye-free and saw some improvement. By accident we gave him grape-flavored, purple tylenol last week and he was awake until 10:30pm! With this new found knowledge I took a closer look at the ingredients in tylenol and was shocked by the crap they put in a product designed for infants! In addition to dye, some other ingredients are high fructose corn syrup, parabens, and sucralose. My feeling is if I am not willing to give Quinn one of these ingredients for dinner, why would I ever give him a medicine that includes them? So now I am in search of alternatives: Hyland’s Teething Tablets for the aches associated with teething, Fever-All suppositories in case of a fever (recommended by a pediatrician when Quinn had fever and was vomiting), but what to give for other aches and pains? Suggestions welcome!