Becca

Also in case it’s useful, here’s what we did to finally convince our then just-turned-4 year old to poop on the potty when we had lots of time at home on our hands during the pandemic. I read on the internet about people doing this very gradual thing involving cutting holes in the diaper that get bigger and bigger and this is exactly what we did. We had a sticker chart and she got stickers for making progress. Step 1 was to poop in her diaper in the bathroom (as opposed to wherever she happened to be). Step 2 was to poop in her diaper while sitting on the toilet. Step 3 (of which there were multiple incremental steps) was to have her poop on the toilet with her diaper after cutting a hole in it. The hole started out tiny, but each time we made it a tiny bit bigger, until eventually one day it was big enough for poop to partially fall in the toilet (really gross to clean up, but we were just delighted by the progress!). Then eventually the diaper was more like a belt the hole was so big, and at that point she could see it was no big deal to do it without a diaper. She was really proud of herself when she finally did it, so it was definitely some kind of fear holding her back. In fact, around the time we started potty training (2 and a half-ish) she had a couple of poop successes but something got to her and she wanted a diaper to poop. She’s now 8 and finds the story of how we persuaded her to poop in the potty hilarious.

Our now nearly 3 year old also had/has constipation unrelated to potty training, although the constipation started a little later for us (maybe around 15-18 months, I don’t recall exactly when, but she also wasn’t a very regular pooper as an infant, which I put down to breastfeeding, as I understand breastfed babies often go a long time between poops at least while on a full-milk diet). I was also reluctant to start the miralax though I didn’t have a good reason for being reluctant and everything I’ve read suggests it’s very safe. I’ve now made my peace with the miralax: she’s on a full adult dose and we also give her a pedialax magnesium pill everyday. Even with those meds, she wasn’t going daily, especially whenever she got a cold (something about the mucus slowing everything down perhaps???) Instead it would be a massive poo every few days (including occasionally a poop because we resorted to a glycerin suppository if she’d gone more than 4 days without). The poops were soft, perhaps suggesting she wasn’t actually constipated, but massive and infrequent. But then we started potty training, which I was dreading because of her constipation (and because our oldest daughter insisted on a diaper to poop until she was 4 despite being fully potty trained for pee at 2–she never ended up withholding, but our pediatrician was very firm with us we should let her poop in the diaper because our pediatrician feared pressuring her to poop on the potty would cause withholding, which she assured us was a much worse problem). At first, pooping on the potty for our nearly 3 year old was a huge ordeal. A couple of the first times, it literally took 2-3 hours from first signs of needing to go to the poo coming out. But now she is pooping really regularly much smaller poos without fanfare, at least daily, sometimes more than once a day! So something about potty training seems to have made her muscles click into action. That makes me tempted to stop the miralax, but planning to wait to ask her pediatrician for advice at her 3 year old checkup, as don’t want to disrupt the really good thing we now have going.