![]() Although it is not common, some can go for what seems like a disturbingly long time (like a week or more) without pooping. In other words, some babies - especially breastfed babies - simply do not poop every day. In this larger sample size, we can also observe that there are infants with an average of less than one poop per day. In the first several weeks, the range is enormous, and then it settles down. Frequency declines on average as children age, which we can see in the graph below. The authors find wide variation in bowel frequency, especially in the youngest babies. For a broader sense, both in age and food intake, we can turn to this paper, “Bowel habits of healthy Australian children aged 0-2 years.” These authors track 140 children over a week, asking their parents to report on their bowel habits. This article focuses on breastfed infants up to six months. The primary conclusion of this study is that there is a lot more variation in breastfed infant poop than traditionally acknowledged, and the authors propose a more detailed infant poop classification scale, with more categories, to better capture the wide variation. However, I take from this that there is a large range in how watery the poop is, and how easily it escapes the diaper. The numbers are, I confess, difficult to interpret. ![]() There is also variation in color, with normal stool appearing yellow, orange, green, and brown, all in fairly high frequencies (see graph).įinally, there is significant variation in “viscosity.” As the article says, “In order to understand the behavior of the infant stool as it would penetrate into a diaper, the rheological properties of stool were measured.” In service of this understanding, they produce detailed viscosity measurements. Younger babies poop more, but there is variation across all ages. The graph below shows the frequency of pooping by age. They collected infant stool, weighed it, transferred it to plastic jars, and conducted visual color analysis.Ī central argument of this paper is that there is a lot of variation across normal infant poop. They use some parent reports, but also quite a lot of original data collection. In this study, the authors collect data on 78 breastfed infants, looking for information on the frequency, weight, and appearance of their feces. And those researchers write papers like this one, entitled “Characterizing Exclusively Breastfed Infant Stool via a Novel Infant Stool Scale.” This is why it is good that researchers are specialists and not generalists there is, inevitably, someone whose research agenda focuses on normal infant poops. If you want to better understand the range of normal infant poop, it is necessary to study it in detail. ![]() Today we’ll take something of a deeper dive into the infant poop data, provide some data-based reassurance, and then a few things that you should pay attention to. But it is also non-specific enough to leave people still worried. “There is a wide range of normal!” they will tell you. Perhaps because up to the point of childbirth, most of us have spent only a limited amount of time thinking about poop, this is a standard place for new parents to ask a version of Is this normal? Pediatricians, to their great credit, tend to be extremely reassuring about poop. When I mentioned the topic of this newsletter to my 6-year-old, he launched into a song that begins, “Stinkle, stinkle little fart, blew my underwear apart…” I will spare you the rest.) And then, once you have an older child, they will take over the obsession. Potty-training time is another key moment when poop occupies your brain space. ![]() (I will note that this doesn’t stop with infancy. The frequency of poop, its appearance, consistency - these all occupy your mind in a way that feels very unexpected. When my daughter was born, my husband set up a Google Sheet tracker so we could write down when she peed and pooped (I looked for it for this post, but sadly I think it is lost to posterity). Before you have children, it is hard to imagine the amount of time you are likely to spend thinking about poop. ![]()
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