Toilet training, pooing anxiety

we hope this helps other parents…

We first started to toilet train our son when he was about 2 and then felt he wasn’t quite ready so we backed off.

Our daughter was born when he was 2years and 2months old. This probably took our focus away from the situation for a few months and then by the time we got back to it there were noticeable issues.

He had started to want to wee without a nappy, but we couldn’t get him to use the toilet.  He would always want to go outside.  He started a day a week at family day-care, of which he loved.  He felt it was his special treat to go and play with 3 other boys his age. Only one of which was fully toilet trained.  He started insisting at this point that he wear undies during the day because he was a big boy.  However he never once used the toilet at the family day care and wouldn’t even go outside.  So he would hold on from 9am until 4pm.

We were advised by our Family Health Nurse to go an see a Continence Clinic, which we did.  We moved house not long after which was probably unsettling and the toilet fan was loud and noisy so we detached it and stuck his drawings on the wall, started a reward chart, showed him a DVD which the continence clinic sold us on using the toilet to poo and wee. After lots of hard work we managed to get him to use our toilet and stop going outside, but he was still reluctant to use other toilets.  He would use his nanna and pops toilet and a few others but that was it.

Being a very private little boy, he never once used the toilet at 3 year old and 4 year old kinder that I have noticed.  And to this day after 1st term of school has not used the school toilets either, according to his teacher. His excuse is that they are too noisy and busy and therefore he can’t go.

It was at the age of 3.5years when we managed to get him to wee on a toilet, and this is when the poo problems became very evident and habitual.

He was not wearing nappies at all, not even at night, except when he needed to do a poo.  The continence clinic had suggested we let him use a nappy and sit on the toilet to poo and then gradually limit the use of the nappy. But he was absolutely frantic at any effort to remove the nappy, to the point of traumatic for all involved so we just let this process unfold of him asking for a nappy and therefore he would go to the toilet and do his business and then call out to have it cleaned up and off he would go.

We tried not buying nappies but he would hold on for days until we felt bad enough to give in and relieve his pressure.   This has gone on for years.  We discovered Joane and SLeepTalk® in June 2009 and since then have been using SleepTalk® .  We felt that over the years we had done and said some terribly hurtful things to him in order just to try something, anything! to snap him out of it.  We had spoken so much about it to him that he had switched off and would completely ignore us and change the topic, diverting attention away from the subject.  So SLeepTalk® was the answer.  In the last 10 days he, on his own has decided to stop using nappies.  We were using ‘You can, will and are pooing on the toilet, it’s safe, it’s ok’.

Unfortunately that meant that he also decided he would stop pooing too.  He went 7 days with holding on and in a lot of pain.  After 2 trips to the doctor, a suppository and lots of accidents in his undies, he has finally realised that his body needs to poo and he can’t go on like this.  We changed his SLeepTalk® to ‘you are safe, it’s ok to sit on the toilet’ and the next morning he woke up and said to my husband I need to do a poo, and he went and did one without any fuss.  We are still battling it out gradually but we think that SleepTalk® has finally paid off and we are very grateful.  Thank you Joane.

From two very grateful and relieved parents.