3.5 year old pooing in pants

[FranklinTheCat]

We trained our 3.5 year old 3 months ago - he was showing all the signs but very resistant to the idea, but we ended up having to push him to train as he was vomiting while trying to poo (stopped as soon as he pooed in the potty).

He is very reliable at home but is struggling to poo in particular away from home, ie at the childminder or at nursery. Sometimes he is fine at the childminder's, other times he will slope off and find a quiet corner to poo in. He is very resistant to the toilet at nursery and tends to withhold wees/find a quiet corner to poo in pants.

I'm not quite sure what we do about this. It's not toilet vs potty (we use a sort of potty seat downstairs as no downstairs loo) because he uses the toilet fine a lot of the time at grandparents/childminder. If it was wet pants, I'd wonder about distraction but they're often soiled.

Nursery and childminder both encourage him to go and keep an eye on him, but obviously can't stand over him every minute. We had four accidents/soiled pants the other week.

We're relaxed about accidents but have told him if he doesn't make it to the toilet, that's fine, but deciding to poo in your pants is not ok...

Any thoughts on how to improve things and help him "get" this?

Anyone?

I stumbled over your post and can’t much help from a personal perspective, but I had a dig about to see if I could find anything that might help as I feel for you. My DS did do a few hideous in-pant poos in the early days but it didn’t last - we created and sang a poo in the loo song and looking at other threads this may inadvertently have helped. Someone said it transpired their DS considered the poo ‘his’ and didn’t want to get rid, then talking about where poos go and telling a story; feeding the toilet etc helped bring about a change.

Other commentators said returning to nappies helped take the pressure off, then shortly afterwards their DCs felt ready to move on & controlled the switch to pants themselves.

I worked in a nursery and we had children who didn’t like going there - it can be quite communal and they wanted to do it in private! They always came round; I found reacting to accidents in a very relaxed way and talking conversationally about toileting helped remove any embarrassment.

You might ask your DS how he feels about going at nursery, to see if there’s a simple thing that could be done to help calm him.

I hope you get there!