A Tip for Teaching Children to Swallow Pills

I learned this from an engineer at that place I work.

Some kids can learn to swallow pills easily, but others have a lot of trouble. When Q was prescribed daily medication, we were lucky enough to be able to get the capsules that you can open and sprinkle onto food, so we had the luxury of being able to ease into pill swallowing. Still, we figured that Q should learn to swallow pills. Besides, it would be easy for him. This is the boy that will eat anything, who is always hungry. This is the boy that ate dinner and dessert, then went to a cub scout meeting where he ate his own treat and the treat of the boy next to him and then announced, on the way home, that he was starving. This is the boy that eats foods that don't taste good together, like when he dunked his brownie in his chili or swept up the remains of his pork gravy with his peach. (In both cases, he liked the taste combination!) This is the boy that accidentally swallowed a cherry pit recently. A small tasteless pill shouldn't be a problem.

I tried to start with chopped up bits of gummy bears, so I could cut any size I wanted, but when I tried to swallow one myself, I found that the gummy stickiness tended to make me nearly choke to death. My wife found the same thing, so I moved on to a cinnamon red hot. Q tried one, but couldn't stand to have that taste in his mouth for long (go figure) and didn't want to try again. So finally he really got started with a mini M&M. We told him to put a small amount of water in his mouth, tilt his head back, drop the M&M in his mouth, and then swallow everything. He swallowed everything but the M&M. Again and again he swallowed mouthfuls of water and each time he was surprised to ind the M&M still in his mouth. Finally his stomach was sloshing and his shirt was wet. We needed a new plan.

When I told the story at work, a guy (let's call him Mike, because that's his name) suggested using crackers instead of water. He said it was the easiest way to swallow pills.

Home again, I gave Q two crackers and a mini M&M. He popped the M&M in after he'd chewed up the crackers and swallowed everything. After a few more successes, he tried a full-sized M&M. No problem. That night, after he'd taken his medicine sprinkled on food, I gave him an empty capsule and two crackers. No problem there, either.

Now Q can chew up three crackers and pop three capsules into his mouth and swallow it all. He has learned to swallow his capsules with just water, too, but he still prefers the cracker method. For my son, anyway, it works.

I told my dad, who is a pharmacist, and my sister, who is an early childhood educator, and neither of them had heard of this method. They both were happy to hear how well this worked, though, because they've both been asked about getting children to swallow pills.