Can someone tell me if it gets better?

[ALiceM20]

We're late with potty training because everytime we tried before it's been a massive struggle and everyone would tell us he's probably not ready and to try later. He's just turned 4 and for the past month has been doing great wearing pants and going for pees
There was no struggle there
What we have struggles with are the poos
He will frequently have little accidents with that
He won't properly poo his pants it will just be constant small bits of poo
Whenever I'd ask him if he needs to poo it's alwyas a no and then half an hour later he may have another accident (sometiems as many as 7 pair of pants needs to be washed a day)
Quite a bit of time (although not always and doesn't avoid all accidents) if I sit him on toilet after lunch and keep him on it for 5-10mins he will end up doing one despite a minute ago claiming he doesn't need to go

Tried the obvious things like rewards charts etc but doesn't seem to help anything

Does it get better? Does he need more time for it to click to learn when he needs to go?
Does anyone have experience with this?

Might be constipation?

Sounds like he might be a bit constipated, take a look at the ERIC website.

@Oldermum84 @Intersmellar
I thought constipation symptoms was the very hard, dry poos?
The little bits he does through the day in his pants look normal soft

But I will check out the link 😊

i thought that too, but sometimes children having accidents and loose stools can be overflow around a blockage in the bowel.
worth a look just Incase!

We had a similar experience. In the end, if we suspected he needed a poo we would sit him on the potty with iPad nursery rhymes to occupy him and just wait it out with him. Sometimes took 30-45 mins but eventually it got better.

As the other posters said, this definitely sounds like constipation.

My son has suffered from exactly the same age and he is now 13 and still has to take stool softeners every day or the same happens still.

Something to do with having a bit of a lazy gut that doesn't process the food properly and causing the back up and overspill so to speak.

Just an update, we spoke to gp and they said it did sound like constipation and prescribed him laxatives.
Now few days in and we're dealing with constant accidents with diarrhea
However not sure if its due to laxatives or the bug going around our house atm 😑

I've been sitting him on toilet for around 10mins after each accidents as that's approximately how long it takes to find out if he'll do some more or not
Sometimes more will come out other times not
I'm assuming he'll get better at telling when it's coming as time passes?
Never had this issue with our oldest when potty training so it's completely new