Poo anxiety

[Northernmama123]

Looking for some advice please lovely people. Warning - poo talk!

My 2 year old recently had a bout of constipation and her poo was coming out really hard and she was getting upset when trying to go.
This only went on for about 2/3 days and we sorted it with lots of liquids, fibre and fruit which got things moving along nicely.

Since then, she gets really anxious and upset when she needs to poo. She’s going up on her tiptoes which tells us she is trying to hold it in but when it comes it’s nice and soft and normal.

We’ve been reassuring her and holding her hand and talking about how pooing is normal but she’s still getting upset.

Does anyone have any recommendations or ideas how we can help her to relax around her bowel movements? It’s very upsetting to see her like this 🥹

Aww I’m sorry. We have been through this a few times with my DS and it’s upsetting. We sat next to DS when he was on the toilet or potty and told him funny stories to help him relax. Also found that letting him watch and episode of his favourite tv show helped. To be honest anything that takes their mind of it.

It might be worthwhile taking her to GP to see if a light laxative might help. We got movicol and that helped just to get things completely back to normal. We also found just doing regular toilet breaks even if he didn’t really need the toilet helped.

Sorry, I’m not sure if my advice is any good but I sympathise!

Thank you, that's really helpful. We did get lactulose off our GP and she had 2 doses and it all went back to normal.
We've been trying to potty train her too but not having much luck with that so we've paused it whilst we try to get her back to feeling comfortable with pooing.
Thanks for the advice again

Pausing the potty training is a good idea. We took a pause when it happened and let DS stay in his nappy as he relaxed more that way and in turn made him less anxious about doing a poo