Both of them are available.
First of all, it is not necessary for your child with a cough to drink honey.
The most important thing is to find the cause of the cough and treat it rather than blindly stopping it. Suppressing the cough is not conducive to recovery. If your child's persistent dry cough is a nuisance, honey may be an option for the purpose of making your child feel comfortable.
Secondly, do not have high expectations for the cough suppressing effect of honey.
The reason of taking honey for children's cough is that there is no safe and effective cough medicine for children, while there is some evidence suggesting that honey has a soothing effect on children's coughs, which even stronger than Diphenhydramine.
But what we need to know is that the evidence for honey's ability to stop cough is not strong either. There is no strong evidence for or against the use of honey in children's cough [1], and the main evidence in support is an randomized controlled trial from Israel with a total sample size of 270 people [2].
Finally, it can be consumed directly as well as diluted.
In the Israeli RCT study of honey applied to children with cough, the experimental group was drinking the honey either directly or diluted with a caffeine-free beverage, and the recommendation of Uptodate is that it can be drunk either directly or diluted with liquid.
It remains to be reminded that honey is a risk of botulism in children under 1 year old.
