This is a very common complaint and most children will complaint of abdominal pain. It is not easy to see your child in pain. It is very difficult to see your child crying in pain. Is it really something previous? Should you really worry if you have a child with abdominal pain? The answer is both yes and no. though it is a very common complaint, most of the time, the reason for pain in the abdomen are very simple and elementary and the commonest we see today is constipation. If your child is not trained to pass stools everyday at a fixed it or consumes less fiber in the diet, the child can have constipation and when the child has constipation, it can lead to accumulation of gas causing time sever pain. So this is the commonest reason of very severe pain in children. Just maintaining a toilet hygiene of a regular time, proper fiber rich diet which contains more wheat, green leafy vegetables, fruits can enable a child to pass stools regularly. One must avoid junk in the form of anything that contains maida or a wheat derivative like bread, pastas, noodles, biscuits, all this constipates children. Excessive consumption of fruits like apple and pomegranate and excessive consumption of non-veg food can also constipate children. So see ha your diet is balanced and of course encourage regular stooling habits. Babies who are bottle fed, consume too much of milk and have less solid food and have less fiber in the diet, can also be constipated. So it is best to avid bottle feeding, and it is bets t reduce the consumption of milk, especially after the age of 1 year so that the child does not develop constipation. If you have a child who has normal habits of stooling and still has abdominal pain, then there could be a variety of reason, there could be a simple infection like a diarrhea or a dysentery which causes abdominal pain. In a smaller baby colic pain can cause abdominal pain. You can have involvement of urinary tract which can cause abdominal pain, if there is involvement of the liver, if you have jaundice like condition cause abdominal pain. So the conditions are many. Sometimes there are surgical causes. So if you have very severe pain, vomiting and pain localized to particular area, one may think of appendicitis. So all these conditions are less common and the commonest cause is constipation. W e also have another entity, that is recurrent abdominal pain of childhood. So these are children who keep on having a little tummy ache here and there and it disappears. By and large if your child is sleeping through the night, and not getting up in the middle of the night with abdominal pain or is crying with abdominal pain or the pain is diffused, around the umbilicus and not localized to an area, these are benign pains and please do not worry. There are children who seek attention with abdominal pain. You must be cautious where the cause is psychogenic or attention seeking causes of abdominal pain. So parents don’t panic if your child has abdominal pain. See where the pain is and how severe it is, and how recurrent it is and then you should see a doctor and decide how to treat this issue.
