Potty Troubles - Arnold,MD

Kimberly gave you a lot of great advice. I will add a few things from my holistic practice.
This is fixable, despite what some other poster's Dr. said. Most Dr.'s are not required to take more than 10 hrs. of nutrition in med school anyway.
In addition to fiber, water is extremely important in this equation. Smoothies are a great way to get veggies, and fiber into her. You can disguise many veggies in a smoothie. Get to Whole Foods or MOM's and look for the non dairy smoothies. Dairy is definitely a big issue. Look at labels because even cheeses that say soy, or almond sometimes have casein( dairy product) in them.
There is a wonderful chiropractor in Annapolis that works on children. I don't have the name near me. But feel free to contact me and I can get this to you.
Chiropractic can help with potty issues.
Keep working on it.
L.

2 things I do w/my son (2 yo, picky eater, constipated frequently) is put just a spash of prune juice in w/apple juice and water. The combo of the added water and the prune juice help but the apple juice mask the flavor. He also LOVES mac and cheese. So I buy organic/reduced sodium and when I make the cheese sauce, I add in pureed spinach (either organic baby food or make your own). I have also used squash purees, apple purees and carrot purees. They have helped A LOT.

Have you talked to your pedi about adding benefiber or some other supplement to her foods?

Good luck.

Will she eat food that naturally has large amounts of fiber? Like raspberries, pumpkin, squash? How about prune juice?

load her up with fiber that she doesn't know about. We would give fig newton "cookies", plum smart juice with extra fiber, syrup on pancakes, anything you can think of that has fiber in it that you can get into her without her knowing. I would break the Miralax habit. She can develop a dependency on that. My daughter is extremely picky, so we had to really work hard to get the fiber foods snuck into her diet.

My daughter had a related problem once and we actually visited a pediatric G.I. specialist. For keeping stool soft, he recommended prunes, prune juice and even pear juice, believe it or not. Also, push as much water all day long as you can. Disguise the stuff she won't take straight.

ice cream daily. :) you can get sugar free also

V8 VFusion juice works wonders!! It is healthy for your daughter and it will keep her regular. I dilute my sons - 50% juice and 50% water. When our Pedi asked what type of juice I began, he was thrilled that we started with the V8 Vfusion for the health and regularity reasons. Hope this helps your daughter too.

I just talked to our pedi about this today. He said that some kids just never grow out of this, and some do, and that our guess was as good as his as to when it would ease up for her. He said that you could take miralax every day for the rest of your life and you'd be fine, so until she is eating healthier, I'd just stick with that.