Dehydration is a scary and dangerous thing, especially if it isn’t handled properly right away. For parents, it’s not always easy to tell when your children haven’t had enough to drink. This is especially true if your kids are playing outside and aren’t even thinking about how thirsty they are.

Fortunately, there are things you can do to prevent dehydration in your kids and quickly detect it if it becomes a problem. Detection is the first step to rehydrating your child and avoiding serious health consequences from prolonged or severe dehydration.

How To Detect Dehydration in Your Child

Children aren’t always capable of telling you what they are feeling. Your child may not be able to communicate when he or she is dealing with symptoms of dehydration. Fortunately, you can spot signs of dehydration pretty quickly if you simply know what you should be looking for. Here are some commons signs of dehydration in children:

• Their legs and arms feel cold when you touch them.
• Their tongue and mouth seem dryer than normal.
• They are unusually cranky, have low energy, and seem listless.
• They aren’t urinating as often as usual.
• Their eyes look like they are sunken or don’t produce tears when crying.
• Their skin is unusually saggy and doesn’t spring back as usual (you can test this by gently squeezing a small fold of skin on your child’s stomach for three seconds, then releasing it. If it takes more than two seconds for the skin to bounce back to normal, you need to provide hydrating fluids right away).
• Their heart rate and breathing speed up.

If your child doesn’t quickly receive hydrating fluids when experiencing the above symptoms, he or she will develop worsening symptoms. Severe dehydration is an emergency situation and can be life-threatening.

Keeping Your Child Hydrated

The best way to handle dehydration is to keep it from happening in the first place. Here are some preventative measures you can take to keep your child hydrated and avoid the common symptoms of dehydration.

1. Give your child a daily multivitamin. An organic multivitamin for kids contains the vitamins and minerals necessary to retain vital fluids and reduce fatigue associated with dehydration.
2. Bring water bottles with you when taking your child to the park, swimming pool or any other place where they are more likely to become dehydrated.
3. Make drinking water fun. You can infuse water with slices of lemon or berries to add a bit of pleasant flavor to your child’s water. You can also put water in a fun water bottle so your child is more likely to rehydrate frequently.
4. Provide your child with supplements as needed. In addition to organic children’s vitamins, you can also give your child electrolyte powders in water to help replenish fluids and electrolytes lost in his or her sweat. Baby Wellements offers a variety of organic products designed to help kids stay healthy, hydrated and well throughout the year.

These are just a few of the things you can do to keep your children well-hydrated this summer and all year long. Well-hydrated kids have the energy and vibrancy to enjoy a high quality of life.