# Potty Training help??



## Cherry (Sep 23, 2009)

My twins are 3 years and 3 months. My son has successfully transitioned. My daughter on the other hand hasn't. She continues to poop in her panties.... We try to let her know its okay to wear diapers, but she most of the time refuses. We go through 5 pair of panties in one night with her. She will scream the entire time if we force her to wear diapers or pull ups. It's increasing my laundry schedule . Should I just plan on making laundry a part of the routine, do we buy more panties?? Or do we try and stand our ground on forcing her to wear diapers?  she only does it when we are home.
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## anotherguy (Dec 14, 2011)

Thats tricky. I'm sure she feels singled out because her twin doesnt have to wear diapers anymore... you know.. a 'big girl', and kids at 3 want nothing more than to feel grown up.

I mean, you cant reason with a 3 year old - and you cant have them screaming constantly either - basically flipping out because you are 'forcing' her to wear pullups. Chances are - she would just take them off as soon as your back is turned anyway. You know how it is.

Do they sleep in seperate beds? If so I would at least try to make her wear pullups to bed. Explain to her you just dont have enough sheets or clothes... go easy - and really celebrate when things go well. "Yay!". Keep asking her if she needs to go potty in the day - she just doesnt realize it until you see her standing there with that fart away gaze in the middle of the living room with pee running all over the carpet. Its crazy. I would guess you need to try and keep a lid on the competition between the two of them and minimize the embarassment she will inevitably feel - but at the same time to need to keep after her to use the potty until she can figure out when to go on her own.

fun times.  Remember - it WILL end. Really, it will.

Our oldest never peed the bed...EVER. She had a few accidens of course, but I could probably count on 1 hand the number of times. Our second had a harder time with it - the doctor even saying that she was a bit incontinent - whe would poop/pee everytime she laughed - and she is a giggly kid! Eventually she got past it and is now fine... took a few months. Having 2 of them on different trajectories at the same time would be hard.


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## Hope1964 (Sep 26, 2011)

Some kids have an irrational attachment to their poop - they think of it as part of their body and they don't want it to get flushed away - it scares them. I've never dealt with it, but apparently if you make the depositing of the poop into the toilet and the flushing away a ritual type of thing they can get over it. Kinda say goodbye to the poop, even leave it in the toilet and admire it before it gets flushed.

Sounds bizarre but apparently it happens.

Have you tried letting her run around and sleep with nothing on her bottom? Sometimes that can work for some reason too.

Anyway, I think 4 years old is about when kids are thought to have a problem if they're still pooping their pants. Stock up on laundry soap I guess.


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## Cherry (Sep 23, 2009)

anotherguy - they do sleep in separate beds and we manage to get a diaper on her with no problem at bedtime. This is one of those situations where I don't want to push her if she truly is not ready. We were rewarding the with chocolates for a little while... You can imagine what direction that went.... My kids were 'pottying' every 10 mins whether they had to or not! Thank you for the suggestion.

Hope - interesting, ill have to see if it is an attachment thing with her. She gets attached overall to some strange items.... Not toys, but clothes, paper, little itty bitty items. She has a check up this year, I should discuss with her pedi too. Thx!
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## Homemaker_Numero_Uno (Jan 18, 2011)

PottyMD site has a lot of suggestions and references.
She could be constipated...you don't say if the 5 pairs of panties are from wetting or soiling. But constipation itself can lead to pressure on the bladder. If she is constipated you might have to switch up her diet a bit. The wetting will be easier for her to control once pooping is normalized, on schedule. The best time to 'go' is about 10-20 minutes after a meal. You can try after breakfast and after dinner. Other times it is not worth making a big deal over. If the panties are from wetting, just get some that are made with all-in-one coverage, they're toilet training underwear. Or you can get more underwear, they are fairly cheap, really...and put them in a soak bucket (away from the kids, so they can't have any accidents with that... with some OxiClean in it, so you can soak the accidents in between laundry days.) 

I had a child who was incontinent for 7 years due to a spinal cord problem. If our family had a family crest it would be a toilet seat with a plunger instead of a sword and some disposable non-latex gloves, with a fringe of diaper wipes going round the toilet seat. My youngest had issues because she had allergies. Once in a while she needs a glycerine stick to 'go' but not lately. Here is a good thing to remember: a poop generally needs to be as big or bigger than the one before it in order to trigger the 'urge' to go. So if a child withholds the problem gets worse. What you might see as soiling could very well be overflow leakage, poop sneaking out around the constipated poop. Once the bowel gets so stretched out, it will take at least 6 months to recover, due to how the nerves work inside the anal sphincter. They are pressure sensitive, as explained. The first thing is to add foods that fight constipation. Then you might have to take matters into your own hands, after consulting with your pediatrician. There are junior sized glycerine sticks. I used to have to give my child enemas, but that has been a couple years. Once the poop was under control for her, she stopped having a day time wetting problem. She is still working on nights. Allergies are tough. They make you need to pee. And they can wreak havoc with the intestines. 

Don't be too quick to jump onto psychological reasons. I mean, address the normal issues but weed out the physical ones too.

Going too often is a problem too. The bladder has a 'magic capacity' which should trigger the need to pee. If she has been emptying her bladder too frequently for those chocolates, then her nerve that triggers the need to pee might now be overly sensitive, and her capacity diminished. My son who needed spinal surgery, had impaired nerves, and as a result his bladder got twice as big as it should have been for his size/age! The bladder is a muscle, and you need to think about the training of it as a window of opportunity in terms of capacity and urge response...those nerves are connected to the brain...but not consciously, although you can consciously make yourself pee, usually the way it develops is that you become aware of the need to pee/poop. As I said, if she has been peeing so often to get a reward, then she has not had all that training that could have happened of being aware, since she exerted conscious control instead. But don't worry, because of the age, it is easy to get the brain to be flexible about doing it again, with awareness...if her bladder was only being allowed to fill to a certain point, it's my guess that when it now gets to that point (every 30 minutes) she has to piddle. That's exactly what she trained to do to get the treats. I'm not saying that the treats were a bad idea. You probably were unaware of the need for timing and spacing out the rewards to every 1.5-2 hours. Schedule is everything. Just take about 6 weeks off to let everything settle down and then try again.


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## Cherry (Sep 23, 2009)

Thanks homemaker. Each time she does it, its primarily a very small amount of poop, no pee. She doesn't have large bowel movements often... And she does not go poop at daycare ever they said, they are there from 7 to 3:30 every day. When we are home during times when she would normally not poop at all, she does the pooping in the pants thing. For now I will plan on investing in some more panties for now and set up a soaker bucket . At least my son is 99.9% out of diapers... Not near as painful on the finances 
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## Almostrecovered (Jul 14, 2011)

true story- my oldest son had a hard time with the poop part too

we tried bribery and told him that if he pooped into the potty he would get an ice cream cone. So when I dropped him off at daycare I told his teacher what the deal was so she could tell me if he did or not.

When picking him up, his teacher told me how he got all excited that he pooped in the potty and told his teacher. She went into the bathroom to check as the kids often don't flush and to see if he needed to be wiped. At first she saw the poop in the toilet and was about to congratulate him but then got a better look and realized it was a lincoln log floating there.

My little stinker tried to scam his teacher at age 3.


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## Cherry (Sep 23, 2009)

LOL... Ours did that to us when we first started training. My son loves chocolate, more so than my girl. So one night they went into the bathroom, were real quiet, a few minutes he comes running out to tell me he went potty... Something made that not believable, he had just went potty a few minutes earlier. Turns out my girl went potty for him  3 years fib, but they tell you the truth if you ask just them 

Lucky for us we didn't get any Lincoln logs until after my son was trained.
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## that_girl (Jul 6, 2011)

Girl, I am RIGHT there with you.

My girl is 3 years and 2 months and has NO interest in the toilet. My older daughter was potty trained at 3. 

I don't really push it. She won't go to college in diapers. Lately she's been showing some interest...but not enough to put on her undies.


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## Cherry (Sep 23, 2009)

LOL... That's true about college. It's the poop in the panties that I'm getting a little aggravated about... We will ask her if she has to go and she's says no... Then 10 mins later she is poopy. If she'd just wear a diaper . But anyway, just got back from the store, 6 new pair of panties. We will survive this 
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## tacoma (May 1, 2011)

Heres how we got our daughter to use her potty.

We kept it near her, the little potty chair thing so it was close when she got the urge.
So it was often in the living room where she played.

I had a hard time with her and the potty until a friend told me to get a roll of stickers, little kid stickers clowns cartoon characters whatever she's into.

Every time she successfully used the potty I'd let her put a sticker on the side of it.
She really liked this and her pOtty ended up looking like a WW2 flying ace ****pit cover with all the little stickers for "kills" all over it.

I know it sounds weird but the stickers are what did the trick for me.
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## Homemaker_Numero_Uno (Jan 18, 2011)

She could be withholding during the day at day care and then has trouble loosening up that muscle in the evening. Kudos to you it does seem as though she is more relaxed at home, letting it all out  

Still, you might want to try adding the foods to her diet that will reduce constipation and also eliminating any that contribute to it. You can also try Miralax short-term but that's something to discuss with doctor...along with glycerine sticks (suppositories, they make junior strength) at one time my child also took Ducolax (pediatric strength). You might even have to clean her out with a pedi enema, a simple stomach x-ray will show what's what. BTDT with my son. If she is super backed up then enema is the kindest thing to do, followed by a few weeks of using glycerine sticks to make sure she has a poop every day. Cannot skip a day. 

At this point, it would be worthwhile to take her in to a doctor and have some simple tests run like for thyroid which can cause constipation, and also the x-ray to see if she's backed up and has overflow or is just normal flow with small amounts being pushed out at home... that will give you information on how to approach the issue. You'll also be able to visualize her bladder, though that's hit or miss depending how full she might be.

The soak bucket is definitely going to take some stress off of you. When you go out you can just use a pee pad cut to the size of her car seat and put that down...also I used to carry a couple zip-lock bags, with wipes and disposable gloves, and a change of pants and undies, or several of these sets of accident kits. Of course, my son had fecal incontinence sometimes up to 20 times a day. The surgery for him was life-changing. Probably it's easy to understand why when the surgeon said 5% chance of success, 1% chance of failure or worse, I took it and glad of it. There was no way I could have lived like that beyond what I did. I thought I would have to be doing bowel program/enema every day for him...and many parents do just that for their children who have disabilities. People will stand outside the handicap bathroom when they are old and bang on the door with their cane and huff huff you when you come out with a 6 year old and your bag o poopie clothes. They don't get it. At all.


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## FirstYearDown (Sep 15, 2011)

As a former nanny, I have trained more than one child. I say this because my past employers were extremely busy corporate families, where both parents worked 60 hour weeks. I was spending more time with these children than the people that made them.

Potty training books and rewards worked very well. I used Smarties as well as M&M's. 

I was completely trained by age 2. Every child is different and I believe that as long kids are out of diapers by the time they are in kindergarten (age four in these parts), there is rarely anything to worry about.


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