My toddler cry's every time he has to do a poo

[Salina2]

My 20 months old son cry's every time he has to poo, it started when we started fresh milk when he turned 1, long story short we have been given a range of medications to try and fibre drinks but nothing is helping. I have tried everything food wise and all natural remedies, we have an appointment in October after much struggle with a dietitian, it took us a whole year to get this appointment!

I was wondering if there was any other parents out there who's children have had or have the same problem and maybe you can shed some light on this, all advice will be appreciated.

My dgs was much the same. Prescribed lactose no effect.
Put brown sugar on cereals lots of fruit and veg juices and water. Avoid banana and chocolate. Now seems fine. Bit scared of the toilet but will tell you when he needs a nappy. Seems scared of potty. Dry day and night. As long as he goes we are happy. 3 .5 at this stage.

Can you afford to go private? I’d really try and get some help privately as once a child starts withholding then it becomes even trickier.

My DC had this with impacted stools and a fissure.
It took over a year to get them back to a place of normality.
They had impaction and overflow trouble. We were days from emergency surgery at one point.
There’s a site called ERIC i think that had loads of good advice about encouraging them to go regularly and things that help. Let me see if I can find it.

www.eric.org.uk/letstalkaboutpoo

This is a great place to start while waiting for your appointment.

My son only really got out of pooping once a week. We could see his tummy get bigger and bigger every day

Fairly open if we wanted him to poop we would put him in the bath for a while because that relaxes tummy muscles.

It then started becoming his place to poop 🤦

I increased his fibre, he liked eating dried prunes thankfully and also I gave him cosy Weetabix or porridge at night. Recently he has started pooping daily or even twice daily.
I think there was some kind of psychological issue going on. It was like he thought it was bad to poo. He saw me and his dad do poops and wave bye bye to them and now he just takes himself off to a cupboard to poop on his own..

My Dr said he didn't want to go down the suppository or drug route because they then adapt do getting used to pooping with help.

Sorry my message posted before I finished.

My understanding is that once the bowel is distended then diet won’t make a difference. We were told to get our son regular using Movicol. We did this for 6months till he found it very easy, and forgot what it used to be like.
You have my sympathy. It’s quite stressful watching them struggle with something daily.

Do you need to keep giving milk?

Does anyone in the family have allergies? My colleagues child had an allergy and then they had a sibling who was crying. Turned out to be the same allergy. The GP hadn’t clicked.

The other thing is the movicol. Perhaps others with more experience can help, but I think you are meant to use it until dc has actual diarrhoea.

Then ease back on the meds a little until it’s just soft poo. If you do that, if there are any fissures or piles starting it will give them a chance to heal as nothing is stretching them.

Some people just use it and then stop too quickly. So the problem comes back.

It could also be allergies to wheat or something else. Allergy testing is good to work out what. Privately if necessary as every day when your child is in discomfort is distressing for all involved.

[quote Salina2]@MilduraS was it the 100% pure prune juice? Is there a certain amount he should be having? Thank you [/quote]
He had half a bottle of the prune juice every day. The bottles were around 250ml, similar to the single serve bottles of orange juice. His mum asked me to water it down half and half with water because he still enjoyed it and it made her worry less about the sugar in fruit juice. As a bonus it kept him more hydrated.

And yes it was 100% prune juice. Can't recommend a specific brand as it was a generic supermarket brand in France, a bit like Sainsbury's or Tesco's own label.

It's better to actually just get some dried prunes, put a few in a cup of water, they absorb the water and get fattened up then blitz in a food processor and spoon feed.

I kno this is an old post but did you get a solution to this as I'm in the exact same boat