Is it normal for a baby not to have a bowel movement for a day?

Regardless of gender, age or status, everyone has to defecate every day. Perhaps many people now have irregular lifestyles, and the time and frequency of bowel movements have become very chaotic. Many young people now often suffer from mild constipation. Under normal circumstances, we should defecate once every morning, and it is normal to have less than three bowel movements a day. So, as infants and young children are a special group of people, how many bowel movements per day are normal? Is it normal if they do not have a bowel movement in a day? Let’s first understand the frequency of bowel movements in babies.

The baby begins to excrete meconium within 10 hours after birth. It is black-green or dark green, sticky, odorless, and a bit like asphalt used for paving roads. Meconium is composed of bile, intestinal secretions, desquamated epithelial cells, amniotic fluid and fetal hair swallowed by the baby in the womb. It usually takes 2-3 days to discharge, about 3-5 times a day. If no meconium is seen within 24 hours after birth, one should suspect congenital malformation of the digestive tract causing fecal obstruction, which requires prompt diagnosis and treatment.

3-4 days after birth, meconium gradually transitions to normal baby feces. For babies under four months old whose main food is milk, their normal stools are mostly paste-like with uniform consistency, quite similar to the paste made of fine sand and water, and may contain a small amount of granular matter the size of pepper seeds.

The stools of breastfed babies are mostly golden yellow, occasionally thin like water or thick soup, slightly green, sour and odorless, and they defecate 2-4 times a day. The baby may defecate more frequently when it is newborn, 4-5 times a day, or even after each feeding. This is because breast milk is easy to digest, easy to excrete, and because of the reflex peristalsis of the intestines after food is input.

If the child has 4-5 bowel movements or more per day, or conversely only once every 2-3 days, but the stool characteristics are normal, the child has gained weight and is in good spirits, then filtering is not necessary.

So from the above article's answer to the frequency of baby's bowel movements, we can clearly know that the frequency of baby's bowel movements varies at different stages. If the baby does not defecate for a day, we need to determine whether the color of the previous stool is abnormal. Generally, if there is no abnormality, there is no problem and it is normal. If your baby suffers from chronic constipation, we recommend that mothers reduce formula feeding and switch to breast milk, so that it is less likely for heat to accumulate in the child's body and cause constipation. Therefore, dietary adjustment is the key to baby constipation.