The secret isn't to get children to "take a probiotic." The secret is to get them to take the right one.

Like many of you, we try to give our five children meals and encourage them to choose nutritious snacks. As you know, this process comes with some battles.

With all the games and activities our children are engaged in comes "treats," the sugary kind. Holidays come with special seasonal desserts. Travel is accompanied by eating out. Everywhere we look, our children are running into options that may disrupt their gut health, which then affects them.

So, we work hard to counterbalance the negative effects on their gut health positive effects: good food, fiber, prebiotics, and probiotics.

When we look at what a probiotic should do, we know that it needs to help manage the gut (increase the good stuff and decrease the bad), strengthen the gut barrier, decrease inflammation, and improve nutrient absorption (among other things).

Our approach every morning is to provide our children a small smoothie loaded in good prebiotic fiber, protein, healthy fats, and greens. We also add in prebiotic fiber and have our children take a gut management probiotic. We aren't looking to overwhelm their little systems with too many of any specific kind of "reseeding" (lactobacillus and bifidobacterium) strains. We are looking for gut management probiotic strains to help establish balance and increase a wide range of beneficial bacteria (including many types of lactobacillus and bifidobacterium).

Take our 5 second quiz to see what probiotic strains our microbiologist chose to use in our children's probiotic. No email, no contact info needed. It's the fastest quiz you'll ever take—just follow all the steps!