Empathic Parenting Blog

The Straw Trick

My son takes quite a few supplements despite having a very strong gag reflex. Here is a trick that he figured out that makes taking pills so much easier, as well as some other ways of getting in supplements.

Find a big, fat straw - I got them from Amazon (here’s a direct link) but my MIL has straws that were used to hold up flower stems and they work OK - check a florist. (I don’t know what kind of plastic they are, and they crack quickly, so if the trick works, it’s worth a pack of straws). Sometimes you can get fat straws from a quick-mart type place in a drink. We wash and reuse ours for quite a while.

Put the straw in juice (we use a tall, skinny glass), and put a capsule into the straw. Try it yourself first. Put the pill all the way down the straw - most pills float but keep the straw firmly touching the glass. The child can practice with small candies, but they must be slippery - no chewables or tablets, even if they taste good! (This is important at first, because if the pill gets stuck at the back of the throat, it feels strange and the child may not want to try anything else for a while.

Now, simply suck up juice and pill together. The straw puts it right on the perfect place of the tongue for swallowing. Some people are concerned the child might choke, but our mouths are trained from an early age to swallow whatever the straw puts there.

Why must it be a capsule to start? These are so much more slippery than tablets plus they don’t have any flavor. Softgels work well too, but do often have flavor, so try these after capsules. There are three ways to deal with tablets:

• If the child takes other large capsules (for example 1g Vit C) we open it up, and stuff a small tablet inside it. Because the capsule has powder in it, there is a little extra space, plus there is more overlap between the two halves of the capsule than is truly needed so the capsule just gets a bit longer. This works well for many medications, as the pills are fairly small, and often have a “split line” so you can easily break them into halves.
• If a larger pill is not a capsule, I cut it in half if needed (as long as it isn’t time release), and I put it into an empty capsule (you can dump out one of a less-expensive supplement to to see if the trick works). Empty capsules can be saved from when you make fruit smoothies, or can be purchased in different sizes from most health food stores and vitamin shops.
• Lastly, some children, especially after using this method a while, can take capsules straight into the straw. (We have a B complex that doesn’t fit in a capsule that my son now takes this way). What I do with most tablets is go to a health food / vitamin store and look for empty capsules. put the straw in juice, the pill down the straw, and suck it up into the mouth. Find a capsule that will fit your pill.

I’ve started buying everything I can in capsules, but for those that I can’t I have mastered the art of squeezing in lots of different things into capsules.

Other Tricks

Splitting capsules: If you have two capsules the same size (one might be empty), you can split them into 2 doses fairly easily by opening the capsule and distributing the powder between the two halves, and then putting an empty half capsule on each end. You can repeat for smaller splits, though you will use a lot of empties. It’s not exact, of course, but many things absorb better in multiple doses.

Distraction: I find my son takes his supplements more easily if he is watching TV and I put the straw under his mouth (once he knows the trick of course) because he is not thinking about it or tensing up his body. (Ditto with not-so-great tasting fruit shakes).

Fruit smoothies are a great way to hide supplements. If your supplements taste bad, you’ll want to use frozen fruit because it numbs the taste buds. (However, an interesting note is that our taste buds often don’t object to supplements we really need - e.g., one way my practitioner tests if I need zinc is to put some on my tongue (a special formulation) - if it tastes horrible you don’t need zinc!). I can’t stand the taste of fish oil in smoothies, but my son doesn’t hardly notice.Overripe bananas are great for sweetening smoothies - slice them into a freezer bag whenever they are spotted brown and no-one wants to eat them.

It’s possible to make smoothies in a blender, of course, but if you have a hand (immersion) blender they make fabulous smoothies. My basic recipe is:

• 1/2 cup whole yogurt on the bottom
• a few chunks frozen banana
• a handful of frozen berries, peaches, or other fruit
• supplements (e.g., powders or opened capsules, liquid fish oil, whey protein powder, magnesium drink mix, Vitamin C, etc)
• Other foods you want to hide (raw tofu, raw egg yolk, frozen cubes of vegies)
• Enough milk (if supplements are too sour) or juice (if it is too bland) to make it blend well

Blend thoroughly, stopping every few seconds to get the air bubble out and adding a little more liquid if needed. I’ll add a little sweetener sometimes at the end after taste testing (or more banana). Sometimes a bit of lemon juice is helpful to make it more “intense” - though it will require more sweetener, it will cover more other tastes as well.

When I use an immersion blender, the consistency is almost like soft-serve ice cream and can be eaten with a spoon.

If fruit shakes are used for “dosed” supplements, it can get tricky if you make too much fruit shake. In this case you might make the fruit shake for the family, and add the child’s supplements after most has been poured out. For non “dosed” amounts, where you just want to get some nutrition in, you can freeze extra fruit shake into cubes, and re-blend them later.

Enzymes: Enzymes shouldn’t be put in fruit shakes because they quickly get activated by the liquid and make the whole thing taste awful. But, they can be mixed into anything fatty such as nut butter or chocolate as fat doesn’t activate them. Or you can use the Straw Trick. There are more tricks on enzymestuff.com for enzymes as well as lots of information.

One of the biggest concepts I’ve been pondering on lately and would love discussion on, is the idea that children are great just as they are, and how to integrate this idea with helping them grow at the same time.

Some of us went to a talk by Jonathan Mooney recently (a fabulous speaker) and he emphasized how normal is an illusion based on a “norm” that often doesn’t make sense, and how children should be celebrated for who they are rather than pushed to be otherwise. It very much hit home for me. So what if my 5th grader is not ready to stay overnight at a camp? It doesn’t mean he won’t be able to when he is ready. Heck, this speaker stretched my understanding even further. As parents we often console ourselves with the thought that “well, he won’t be needing this by the time he goes off to college”. That argument, I find, is starting to get a little stretched as the teen years loom. But as Mooney points out, we don’t all have to be good at everything. His mother helped him spell check his papers in college and now his wife spell-checks his books (as he is dyslexic). Even as a Honors graduate in English Lit from an Ivy League school, he doesn’t really need to know how to spell.

But I especially find this concept difficult with a child that struggles with a lot of anxiety and depression. I don’t think accepting him for who he is means watching him suffer, yet how can you help a child through this without sending the message that something needs fixing, something is broken? And what if the child *says* something needs fixing? “You are great just as you are” only goes so far when one is never invited to birthday parties and one’s best friend goes to them almost weekly.

Perhaps there is no clear answer on this - perhaps it is just one of those lines that requires constant balance.