When your child has a headache or just does not feel good, many of us rush to administer ibuprofen, acetaminophen or just plain aspirin -- but are any of those choices not the optimal one to reduce pain in the young ones?

A recent study showed that ibuprofen was, by far, the most preferred pain medication to give young kids for common childhood ailments like headache and pain from bruises and scrapes.

Ibuprofen beat out acetaminophen and codeine-based painkillers in a study which involved 300 kids. The results broke down like this: after 60 minutes, about half the studied kids who had taken ibuprofen reported what doctors considered "adequate" pain relief -- compared with 40% of the codeine group of kids and 36% of the acetaminophen group.