Starting reception not toilet trained?

[Mumofsend]

I know there is still 10 months to go but it feels a bit like it will never happen. Any experiences of starting school not trained? How do school handle it? He was 4 end of September so an older one.

Hi,

I totally understand your concerns and anxiety about this!

Our DS1 has started primary school this September, he has GDD (he is currently delayed by about 2 years and is a summer baby) and is not toilet trained. He still doesn't know when he needs to go to the toilet and can't communicate this with us yet either - his paediatrician did tell us they wouldn't expect him to be able to do this yet due to his delays.

Anyway, we tried really hard to toilet train his this year regardless, with the upcoming huge milestone of of him starting school and obviously in an ideal world we wanted him to be toilet trained like his peers. I knew he wasn't ready, but we thought we had to try anyway.

It has been such a stressful 8 months of trying to train him! We have stopped and started again in that time. He started making a little bit of progress in the summer, he was still having lots of accidents but was getting happier to sit on the toilet and try to go and he was occasionally successful in doing a wee on it but with starting school he went backwards massively. He started going wearing "big boy" pants and taking 3 changes of clothes a day in a separate bag. Most days he was having several accidents, sometimes going through 4 changes of clothes and coming home in school spares, to then have an accident on the walk home! Or he was not drinking at all in school & therefore having no accidents whilst at school but having one immediately when on the walk home. I tried everything to break the habit he had seemed to get into of having an accident on the way home but nothing helped. And he will quite happily sit in wet clothes without telling the teacher. After much discussion with the school nurse and his teacher/senco we have decided to take a break from it so he is now going in in huggies pull ups. He is so much happier since we have put a pause on it (and to be honest so am I!) we are going to try again when he is showing more signs of being ready. Hopefully next summer at the latest, but we will have to wait and see.