What can I do?
A simple diet. Ensure your baby eats a simple diet of easily digestible, nutritionally dense foods, including cooked vegetables, bone broth and cooked fruit provided they have started solids. Grated carrot is an excellent choice for older infants. You can also include celery, which includes chlorophyll and silicon. Chlorophyll slows the spread of unhealthy micro-organisms and silicon encourages calcium absorption.
Avoid any processed foods or foods that are greasy or full of refined flour and sugar. Highly sweetened products act as calcium inhibitors and promotes the growth of pathogenic or bad bacteria and yeast in the gastrointestinal tract contributing to food stagnation. Promoting daily bowel movements is also very important and can help relieve food stagnation. Including foods such as prunes, apricots, figs, pears, apples, papaya, coconut and which help lubricate the intestines and provide fiber helping to prevent constipation.
Breastfeeding is another excellent way to support your baby during teething. This may be due to the multisensory infant skin touch, the infants being distracted as a result of sucking, and the feeling of security that your infant feels being held. Mother’s milk also contains carbohydrates and precursors of melatonin, which stimulates the release of endorphins, the bodies own natural painkillers, which also may help reduce pain.
Ensure adequate rest. Rest promotes healing and is essential for growth and development. Take the opportunity to have a rest too if you can.
Chamomile Tea is another favourite for relieving the discomfort of teething. By dipping a face cloth in freshly brewed tea, which has cooled, and allowing your baby to suck on it, the chamomile relieves the irritability as well as the pain. An excellent all natural homeopathic remedy is Weleda’s Baby Teething Powder. Made with chamomile root and oyster shell it helps soothe irritation and lessens the pain associated with teething as well as calm irritability. Personally I found this worked brilliantly!
Provide a frozen face cloth or a cold BPA-free teether ring. The coldness will feel wonderful on their sore red and inflamed gums. It is also essential to rub or brush your babies gums or teeth.
Acupressure. There are a number of specific acupuncture points that you can massage to help relieve the discomfort of teething. These points can ease baby’s teething pain, promotes digestion and clear the heat from the digestive system contributing to the inflammation of the gums. Each point can be massaged for 30 sec-1 minute using gentle yet firm pressure 3 times a day. You can access these amazing points as part of the Barefoot Parenting Blueprint Program: https://barefootparenting.com.au/portfolio/taming-your-teething-tiger/
You will also receive access to our video series helping to discover how simple back to basic steps can help you thrive as a parent and assist your baby reaching their full potential.
Until then, happy parenting.
If you liked this article and would like to know more about the benefits of Chinese Medicine in helping to nurture your children naturally you can access more information at barefootparenting.com.au
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The link to the downloadable help sheet is not active… could I still get a copy of this to print off?
Thanks for your interest Wendy. You’ll need to visit the Barefoot Parenting website and get in touch with them there. I will try to get hold of their updated link as well – thanks for pointing that out.