"Will you just poo!!!"

 

My child's poo withholding is one of the hardest parts of my parenting journey. Anyone with a child who withholds will say just how much it takes over your life. Everything revolves around poo.

My eldest, Ollie, suffered quite early on when he was constipated. He's a very sensitive little boy and I think the traumatic experience affected him. He then fell into the vicious cycle of being scared to poo, causing his bowel to absorb more water, resulting in harder poo and worse constipation.

Now, because I suffer from Crohns disease, I'm ultra paranoid that my boys will have bowel issues so I requested a referral to the constipation clinic. The nurse was amazing and she even refrained from asking the popular question of "have you tried prune juice?" That goes on the list of annoying questions along with "have you tried XYZ to get your child to eat?" (see previous blog). Ollie was put on Movicol which is amazing stuff but the main aim was to get him to not be able to withhold at all. You would be shocked at just how much a small person can withhold. We had the jigging, the lying down, the standing on his head and when he got older we had the constant "I don't need a poo, I'm just tired". His behaviour would change dramatically. He went from a kind gentle loving little boy to a snappy, angry, sad, shell of a child. It was truly heartbreaking to see and we often had to cancel plans to go out.

During this time I tried many techniques; reassurance, empathy, star charts (for me that went against my beliefs as I am not a fan of reward charts), and when I got really desperate I even tried scooping him up and putting him on the toilet with both of us sobbing. That was hard.. As a mum you just want to fix the problem and make it all better again. There were many days where I had to go into the kitchen to hide my frustration and scream in my head "just fucking poo!"

The whole experience was a roller coaster. We had days where we thought we had finally conquered it, even a poo a day some weeks, but then out of the blue, BAM.. back to square one again. Nothing had changed, he hadn't had a hard poo so WHY???? Having tried all the techniques mentioned above there was one final bit of advice given to me which was "ignore him". This went against my natural instinct to help my son but I was desperate so thought I'd try. I wasn't allowed to talk about poo, acknowledge his jigging or even mention the "sneaky poo" in his pants. After a few weeks it worked, it actually worked!

I did not potty train Ollie. Whilst this was on the advice from the hospital, I'm a firm believer society is obsessed with pushing children too soon which can result in this hellish situation. At just over 3 Ollie was out of nappies and before 5 he was off the movicol completely and doing fine.

It was almost a happy ending but the bad news was Harrison had seen how Ollie had behaved around poo and had learnt that behaviour. I had it all to do again. The difference this time round is I know we will get through it, eventually...