My younger daughter is 3y 4mo old and we have been TT since last june - starting at 2y 7mo, prompted by her (she was removing her nappy). Initially she made good progress - fully dry days were rare but the concept seemed to have 'clicked' after a few days and after a couple of months she was generally having 1 or 2 accidents a day, but making it to the potty for poos and maybe 4 or 5 wees daily. Then in august, a few weeks before moving house (which happened in sep) she began to stop engaging. By october she was no longer going independently or telling us - just going in her pants 7/8 times a day, unless we happened to intervene and sit her on the potty by chance at the right moment. She had also just changed nursery (she also attends a childminder, who she has stayed with) . We persevered with no progress until xmas, thinking it might be a regression due to the move and change of nursery and would pass in a couple of weeks. But by the Christmas break it had become a power struggle. Her nursery called asking us to put her back in pullups there. We decided to back off for a bit at home too, and take the pressure off for a month or so. After 3 weeks she got nappy rash, so we left her pullup off at home and put the potty down on the floor with no expectation and no prompts (she hates reminders) . She began using it reliably unprompted - provided she was at home with no pants on. If we put them on she just wet/soiled them repeatedly. We thought maybe she needed a more gradual approach so just left pants off at home for 2-3 weeks. All fine. Then (on advice) tried to get her back in pants at home. This seemed to go reasonably at first, with her mainly weeing in the potty/toilet, but often (though not always) not wanting to poo in it - she would try ton withhold, soil a couple of times and then eventually just do a full poo in her pants. For context, she is on a low dose of stool softening medication so not suffering with uncomfortable stools, and we incentivise by letting let her have a choc button if she gets poo in the potty, and stickers on her chart for both poos and wees. This week she seems to have gone back to not telling us she needs to go and just weeing/pooing in pants when wearing them. But I have noticed that if she happens to need to go when pantless (e.g while we are fetching a fresh pair or she is getting in/out of bath etc) she still just goes and uses the potty with no fuss .
I am at a loss as to what to do - we are nine months in and i feel like we have been stuck partway to TT for an unusually long time. I cannot figure out what is going on for my daughter and think we need professional advice, but i have no idea who to ask/where to look - there are lots of conflicting opinions online and i feel like we need someone who can consider both the possibility of medical causes and the behavioural side - but who is that professional? Has anyone encountered a similar situation and found a useful source of help? TIA