Soiling- anyone seek professional help

[Wontpoointheloo]

Just wondering if anyone sought professional help for continuous soiling. My 3.5 year old constantly soils himself and either doesn’t seem to notice or doesn’t care. He is fully dry day and night but just can’t get it with the poos despite trying everything , including bribes, different seats and ladders and potty’s and books and apps. We had a brief period of about 2 weeks where he did a poo in the toilet if not wearing trousers but that has passed and doesn’t seem to be making a return. I’m at the end of my tether and considering speaking to a child psychologist about it but not sure if it’s worth it. Has anyone done this and has it helped.

Have you thought about speaking to your HV first?

I feel your pain, potty training has to be my least favourite part of parenting. Getting them to poo in the toilet always seems to take a lot longer. My youngest is the same age and is only in the last couple of weeks getting the hang of pooing on the potty or toilet. With my eldest it wasn’t until just before his 4th birthday. I made an appointment with the nursery nurse who works with health visiting team as he still wouldn’t poo in the toilet and it was getting very close to him starting school. Having someone other than me/ my husband talking to him about it seemed to really help.

Also you could call the charity ERIC. They have a helpline which is great and lots of good info on their website.

Thanks for the tips nicemarmot. Will look up that charity and see if I can get any help from them. I feel at this stage that my 1.5yo will be trained completely before my 3.5yo. My hv is not very good and not someone I would feel confident in approaching so that is out for us.

I feel your pain. I have a similar situation with a similar aged DC. I ended up going to the dr for a Movicol prescription. Basically this helps make the poo soft and easy to pass. I’m also bribing with tablet time. Every time they do a poo on the toilet they get 30mins tablet time. It’s still work in progress/ early days but seems to be having reasonable results.....

My four year old is always soiling himself and does not care at all. He tries to hold his poo in and just screams the house down when put on the toilet. He has no issues going for a wee. Its driving me insane. we live with my pils and they put all the blame on me. 80% of the time he has a accident is when he is in there care and I still get the blame. We have been to the doctors and got told that theres no issues and than my son is just holding it in.

Contact ERIC in the first place (can be a bit of a battle to get through to their helpline at times as they're over in-demand and under-resourced).

DD2 was like this - it's taken us till age 5 to get things relatively on an OK footing - turned out to be a combination of muscle tone/coordination issues (in part she didn't quite know "how" to poo on cue - we had to explain that as "try to push your tummy button out through your bottom) and constipation as a result of all of that which had stretched things so much she had no sensation at all.

Combination of Laxido to keep things soft and moving easily, timed toilet sits 10-15 minutes after meals for 5 minutes or so and a hell of a lot of shitty pants cleaned up seems to have finally broken the worst of it for us but we do still have periodic regressions where she constipates back up again and then the soiling restarts. She genuinely doesn't know when she's done it though - they really don't.

One bit of advice I'd give - look up the bristol stool chart - you're aiming for type 4 poos once or twice a day... I found logging the time of day, size and poo scale of accident or successful poo really helped - it nailed down a pattern of when to have them sit on the loo in the hope of hitting the jackpot and when we were trying to get a decent dose right for Laxido (same stuff as Movicol/Cosmocol - just cheaper for the NHS so they use it round here) we could see the effects of any changes we did easily... and once it's working - you can spot any potential instances of things blocking up again - so the second we have a change in her pattern of when she goes, I raise the dose slightly for a couple of days and generally that's enough to keep it going. As she's got older it's easier - we can now just say to go to the loo and she'll poo straight away, so we're starting trying to drop the medication and see if we can get her to self-initiate eventually - but at least if she's going morning and night it means I'm not carrying around 27 changes of pants and cleanup kit and praying for no accidents at school.

There should be a continence service they can refer you on to but you might be on the "too young" side for them to do that yet - I know our school nurse service did eventually refer us on (after the referral got lost three bloody times) but by then it was very much an "ok you got this figured out before we got here - keep going and it'll stop eventually bye" situation!