I have a friend who at the first sign of the sniffles heads her kids off to the doctor and gets a prescription. I often tease her about being addicted to prescriptions but she reasons that if the medication is available, why not make your child as comfortable as possible. Besides as a nearly single mom (her husband has a job that requires a lot of travel) she cannot miss out on her rest and be functional the next day.
Consequently, whenever her girls have an ear infection they tend to need the newest round of whatever antibiotic is out there. They have long since outgrown amoxicillin and generally have to take something much stronger.
My approach on the other hand, is to treat symptoms and wait and see. That doesn’t mean that I don’t take my kids to the doctor. It does mean that I am very hesitant to give them antibiotics. Even ear infections, will go away on their own generally speaking. Allowing one’s body to build up good resistance to a virus or bacteria has a lot of merit and where I was once considered odd to be avoiding antibiotics, it is now more ‘main stream’ to take alternative methods.
But here is another reason to avoid antibiotic use if possible during the first year of life. Apparently, babies who receive antibiotics before 12 months of age are more likely to develop asthma as they get older.
Researchers looked at the cases of several infants who had received antibiotics for non-respiratory illnesses like impetigo or urinary infections. (Early respiratory illnesses can be a predictor of later asthma.) So by doing it this way, they separated the cases of those babies who showed no other warning signs or risk factors for developing asthma.
They found that out of the babies they followed, the likelihood of developing asthma before the age of 7 nearly doubled for babies who had received antibiotics before the age of 1. Another key factor worth mentioning is that having a pet in the house like a dog or cat reduces the risk of asthma as well.