This is driving my husband crazy. Our 4 year old son won’t go poopy in the potty. He is fine with urinating and staying dry all night. But he will only poop in his pull ups, and since we ran out of pull ups, in his diaper. No promise of presents, stickers, or other prizes tempt him; loss of stars for good behavior makes him upset, but doesn’t change anything. He just will not go.
He has pooped in his pants–it upsets him, but not enough to go on the toilet. I don’t want to punish or push him too hard because he has had withholding problems and I don’t want to start that again. He used to have constipation problems, until we put him on Miralax and he’s been fine since then, but he will not go on the potty–he doesn’t even want to try.
Anyone have any suggestions or have kids with the same issue? I could also use some sympathetic noises.
I used shame, I’m sorry to say. He’s 24 now, and I don’t remember the details very well. I do remember one time totally losing my temper when he pooped in his pants (no diaper.) I called him a baby and was not nice to him for a while. He was 3.
Good luck! I hope you get some better responses, too.
We had the same problem though not sure it persisted that late. But it’s just a matter of time, as frustrating as it feels. I mean, you know he won’t be doing this when he’s in college. We found that peer pressure was also helpful; does he have friends who are fully toilet trained that can provide a good example?
My method has been just to wait it out. It took him longer than his older brother to pee in the potty too. My husband’s been really getting frustrated though.
We’ve tried going over the list of friends who are fully potty trained. He’s just a very stubborn little boy.
My mom works in a Mom’s Day Out program and has known more than one parent who had success with some form of “If you want to go to Kindergarden, you have to poop in the potty. Kids who are in kindergarden don’t wear diapers”, combined with a message from “the Doctor” (a cross between the real pediatrician and a made-up authority) passing on a similar messsage.
And the good news is that once you figure out the “switch” in your son’s brain which will make him poop in the potty, you will probably have no more problems. But good luck finding that switch.
I can’t vouch for this method, since I didn’t have this problem (pre-school is a wonderful source of peer pressure). But I read it in a book, so I figured I’d throw into the idea pool and you can do with it what you will.
Basically, it’s “make him deal with the consequences.” Which is not to say he has to wear poopy pants or diapers. He has to clean up the mess. He’s not a baby, he’s a big boy, it’s his poop and he has to deal with it. Put it in the potty, wipe his butt and flush the poop away, or poop his pants and take them off and clean up his butt and dump the poop in the toilet and wash the pants with soap and put clean pants on and… Which is easier?
That’s a lot of work for you in the short term, but it’s said to work quickly.
I was given M&M’s if I did it in the Potty. Increase the rewards to straight up Candy, maybe?
Then again, I also read while I was on the Potty (as I loved to read). So that helped me in the whole “waiting to go” issue. As if I had to #1 it was quick and easy, but I (so I’m told) didn’t like the whole waiting on the potty to go to the bathroom part. But then I was allowed to take the newspaper comics or a book in there with me, and so I could sit there and STILL enjoy playing and reading, and not feel like i was missing valuable time by wasting it on the potty.
So maybe that could help, if he likes to read and such things- let him do so on the Potty.
Though in my case then, it led to me sitting on the Potty for 30mins to an hour as I couldn’t come out then until I finished my book. (-_-)
But at least I didn’t hafta go potty afterwards!
No great advice here, but a bit of sympathy. For months after Moon Unit was dry during the day (but not at night), she’d hold her poop until we put her in a pullup at bedtime. Within 20 minutes of getting her into bed, there’d be that wail of “Moommmmmyyyyy, I need to be changed!”. We tried reminding her to sit on the potty before changing, with some limited success.
Then we caught her going into her own bedroom, and changing into pullups herself so she could poop in them. At that point, it was clearly a conscious decision on her part so we started watching for her sudden trips to the bedroom and catching her mid-change. Some reminding her of how big girls can poop in the toilet, and it was no longer a problem. Much easier than what you’re seeing, I guess.
I do wonder what it is about the diaper/pullup that makes them prefer to poop in that. :dubious:
I like the suggestion / reminder that he has to wear big boy pants for everything to be able to go to school / do some other Big Kid thing.
Oh yeah - if you try sitting your son on the toilet at about the time he usually “produces”, has he ever gone in the toilet?
In the “it could be worse” realm… Dweezil had encopresis. I suspect you’ve dealt with some of the same since you mention withholding problems and Miralax. With encopresis, the bowel gets “full” of stool, and there’s a near-constant leakage of soft stool around the stuff that’s stuck. This happened pretty much as soon as we got Dweezil out of diapers (at age 5; he has mild autism and simply was NOT interested in making the switch). He soiled his underwear so constantly that we put him back in pullups for a while until we figured out what was going on - and even with treatment, he soiled to some degree until he was 11 or so. Yecchhhh! He’s only been off the laxatives for about a year now. We’re finally about ready to declare that battle completely over with.
Been there. The paediatric nurse I spoke to said that it can be scary for the kid - the noise of the splash, the possibility of getting their bottom wet from the splash, the longer time in the seat meaning more chance of falling in. From a kid’s point of view, it’s a huge change with huge risks.
They do get over it. The “Can’t go to Kindergarten” worked for mine, and Kindy here is pre-school 3.5 years and up. Her best friend couldn’t come to our house and play, because he hadn’t transitioned yet.
That’s helpful. (No, really, what parents love more than anything else is when they’re describing some problem they’re having with their kids and non-parents chime in with “OMG, this is exactly why I will never have kids! UGH!”)
The promise of being able to go to “school” (actually, preschool) was the big motivator for my son when he was 3. If nothing at all is working and it’s turning into a giant source of frustration, I might consider just dropping the issue for a few weeks to let tensions subside, before trying again.
One thing I will say is that if you make the switch from diapers to underpants, don’t go back, no matter how many accidents he’s having! We switched my daughter from pull-ups to underpants and had two weeks of nonstop accidents, but then she suddenly figured it out and started using the toilet instead. I think if we’d backslid and gone back to diapers at any point during those two weeks, she’d STILL be in diapers. (Well, not really. But it would have taken a lot longer, I bet.)
IANAP, but I have to ask why you’re still using pullups? I’d say put him in underwear and let him figure it out. Pullups just prolong the whole thing by making it easier on the kid.
My daughter went from diapers to “big girl panties” without a problem. My son argued, saying he liked his “dipes”, but we were patient and he came around.
We had issues with my daughter. We used the combination of no pullups, shame, and the Doctor. Yep, shame is still around.
We took her to the peditrician and the peditrician said “big girls use the potty” Then the peditrician said to me - “go get the babyest diapers you can get in her size. NOT pullups. If she uses the potty, she gets to wear underwear. With her it isn’t accidents - if she goes in her pants, she has to wear the DIAPER.”
And that was what we did. Pullups were grown up enough that she was fine with them - but she did NOT want to be in the diaper. Took a few weeks of seeing if mom would budge on the whole thing, then it was over.
I’m not a pullup hating mom - my son was GREAT with pullups because he wasn’t ready to train, but pullups let him change his own wet diapers (and sometimes the other ones if it wasn’t messy - but generally I had to do those still). When he was ready, he switched to underwear without looking back.
you could try chanting: “pee and poo go in the loo!” it worked with a 3 yr old poo flinger on nanny 911. the poo flinger was a girl. there was a dance as well.
with kids not going until 3ish, i’m wondering how the kidlets in my family ended up trained between 1 and 2. we must be toilet prodigies!
i have a blurry memory of cranberry juice (one of the few times i had juice over milk) and picture books. juice, books, and a quiet area; (at 1.5 i was way too little for the big toilet) i was good to go (so to speak).
:moment of realization!?: I think my mom did something like this with me, & I don’t even remember it as a punishment! Just something about teaching me to clean off my soiled underpants in the toilet.
My brother’s kid was 4 and large and determined to wear diapers the rest of his life but then summer came and he got to go up north and play with his other young relatives and they laughed at him for still wearing diapers. Problem solved.
Getting laughed at by your peer group does wonders.
