Helena Lee, from Surrey, had struggled to get her eight-week-old son Alfie to take Calpol medication and ended up “covered in half of it”.
Posting to Facebook on 14 October 2017, she wrote: “Then I remembered seeing this trick. Please feel free to share with any baby mummies you know.”
Lee used the syringe from the Calpol packet and pushed it into the teat of her son’s bottle - so he sucked on it like he would when having milk.
The parenting hack was shared 113,000 times within three days and had nearly 50,000 comments, mainly with people tagging other parents to show them the trick.
“Wish I’d seen this when mine was a newborn,” one person wrote. Another commented: “This is genius, thank you, thank you so much.”
“The response has been insane,” Lee told HuffPost UK. “I still cant quite believe it.
“I only ever intended to share it with a few other mums that I knew were my friends on Facebook
“Now, it’s just gone mental.”