Is Your Toddler Straight-Up Refusing to Poop in the Toilet? Join the Club.

There are few things in pregnancy and parenting that are a complete surprise. You’ve likely been dimly aware of the possibility of, say, vaginal tearing, and you know that children walk at different times. For me, however, “STR” was not something I had ever imagined. When my daughter was an infant, I recall talking to another mom who said it casually—“Oh, everything is great, other than we are dealing with an STR issue.” I didn’t want to pry or seem like an ill-informed parent, so I looked it up later. Stool toileting refusal, i.e. STR, i.e. a situation in which an otherwise potty-trained child refuses to poop in the toilet.

STR may be little known, but there is perhaps nothing else that so encapsulates the challenges of a toddler relative to a baby. Infants are tiring—they cry a lot, they eat all the time, they don’t sleep—but they are easy to manipulate. Most of the time, they do not actively resist you. Parenting them is a bit like being the dictator of a small, poorly functioning country. Not so with a toddler. Before I had children, I never dreamed I’d start preparing to leave the house 15 minutes before it was necessary, just to leave time for the inevitable fight over the horror of socks. Welcome to toddlerdom. Along with choices about discipline and early education, the great question of these years is potty training. When you come to potty training, you will likely run up against the stubborn resistance for which toddlers are so celebrated. Enter STR, a common battleground for toddler self-determination.

Despite the fact that people without children have probably never heard of this, it is quite common.

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