My daughter has always known how to scream. I mean really scream. I started this blog talking about Sasha’s propensity to sound like Fay Wray as a baby. Back then she’d scream that way when she couldn’t figure out how to eat. These days it’s about other things. My friend wearing a polar bear mask. Thunderclaps. And then this other thing that all started with a normal old bath.
Two weeks ago—on the 4th of July, speaking of loud, scary noises—Sasha was playing in the tub on her hands and knees. I saw her glance behind her and wondered, Is something about to happen? And then something did. A big brown something. And when I say big, I mean it was the size of her arm. It was almost impossible to imagine that it came from her. She whipped around, saw it. Instant Fay Wray.
I yanked her out of the tub, dried her off, and tried to console her, telling her it was just an accident and it was okay while Daddy had the fun job of cleaning the tub. Then they flushed the remnants down the toilet. Aside from the surprise of it all, it really didn’t seem like a big deal. Funny, even. My husband and I had to suppress laughs during storytime.
Little did we know, a brand new longest shortest time was brewing. At first Sasha didn’t want to get back in the tub, which was fine. I figured we’d just let it go until she got over it and was ready. But then she wasn’t eating much. Or pooping at all. It was about a week before it dawned on me that she wasn’t simply constipated. After several days of prune juice and plums, I wondered if all of the moaning and groaning, doubled over on the floor—the crying out, “Mommy hold me!”—was not because she couldn’t get her poop out but because she was holding it in. I’ve read about this phenomenon before and never paid much attention to it because it was hard for me to imagine a child—or my child—doing it.
I asked her if she was trying to get the poop out or keep it in and she confirmed: Keep it in.
Why? I asked
Because I’m afraid I’ll poop in the tub, she said.
But you’re not in the tub, I reasoned.
It didn’t matter.
Things really ramped up last week when we visited a friend who has a son Sasha’s age and a newborn. My friend lifted her shirt to breastfeed the baby and Sasha turned her back to my friend, grasping her own chest in what looked like fear. She also freaked out when the little boy her age was wearing a pirate’s eye patch. Clearly, something bodily was going on with her. Bothering her in a big way.
Yes, clearly. That night I tried having her stand in a couple inches of water just so I could rinse her. When that didn’t work, I made an unsuccessful attempt at shampooing her over the sink. We wound up doing a sponge bath on the bathmat (what we’ve been doing ever since then, too) but she was already shampooed so I stuck her in the tub just to rinse her hair for 10 seconds. At which point she threw up into her mouth, her jaw chattered like a scared cartoon character, and she screamed until she could only muster a whisper.
I started contacting my resources. I emailed her pediatrician. I emailed her old pediatrician from Philly. I emailed a social worker who leads mommy-toddler playgroups. Her ped said: suppository. Her old ped said: laxatives. I get it, they’re doctors, they’re going to suggest a pharmaceutical approach. But it didn’t feel right to me. Taking that control away from her and basically saying, You won’t poop? Okay, fine. I’ll make you poop. The laxatives I could pull off, but the suppository? How would I explain it to her? I couldn’t think of a way that she would buy. And it didn’t feel right to lie about this anyway. I really believed that this was a psychological issue at its root (though the peds didn’t like my suggestion that I try talking to a child psychologist) and I had faith that we could solve this with the proper guidance. While I waited to hear back from the social worker, I tried some other things and waited for that prune juice to kick in.
We read these books:
She wants the rainbow undies at the end SO BADLY.
There is also a boy version to this classic.
She loves to answer the question about what whale poop looks like: “BIG!”
We also called lots of people we know and asked them if they poop: our landlords, our neighbors, Grammy and Pops. Grammy even told us that my brother pooped in the tub when he was a baby. Sasha nodded solemnly and added that my sister-in-law had cleaned it up for him. My breastfeeding friend told Sasha that her little boy once pooped in the tub and that it never happened again after that. I told her that now that she knew what it felt like when she was about to poop, I didn’t think she’d ever poop in the tub again either.
But she remained unconvinced.
Yesterday I wound up having a phone call with the social worker I mentioned. What she said was very helpful but also complicated and I want to devote ample time to that, so I will make that a separate post.
Let me just wrap this up by saying, I got pretty worked up reading online about what long-term poop withholding can do to a child physically and emotionally. I worried that I would have to give her the suppository. But I read this one post by a child psychologist (Googling sometimes yields good results!) that made a lot of sense to me and suggested doing NOTHING. To just totally ignore the doubled-over moaning and groaning. To tell her, I’m sorry I’ve been trying to get you to poo. That was wrong. You are in charge of your own poo and I know you’ll do it when you’re ready.
Let me tell you. I don’t know if it was that or the prune juice, but ten minutes later she pooped. And then two more times that day. And it’s been fine and regular ever since.
Now we just need to tackle that bath.
Anyone have similar experiences?
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12 Responses to No Shit
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my daughter LOVES “Even Firefighters go to the Bathroom”. It shows firefighters (obviously) policemen, pilots, dr’s etc. it’s a great fun book!
we have had the occasional tub poops, but they don’t seem to faze my daughter. i do think kids can have phases where something that was previously harmless can suddenly be scary.
i have dried my hair with a hair dryer in front of my daughter since she was born. this week, that noise caused a meltdown.
I’m so glad my post helped! Thanks for the shout-out. I’m always amazed by the power of our children’s development. Learning to trust it is one of the fascinating experiences of parenting. Hanging back, at times, can be the best “remedy”. Aloha!
Dr. Heather! Thanks for commenting. I am trying to take the hanging back approach to Sasha’s reluctance to bathe as well, though I’m having a more difficult time with that. (She gets so stinky! Plus there’s so much sunscreen and chlorine and bug spray in the summer.) We are moving tomorrow and I’m starting to think this withholding of poo and hygiene is a control thing because she must just feel like the move is just happening TO her, even though we’re only going a few blocks away.
my daughter went through a poo phobia – the issues were slightly different but I wonder whether any of the strategies we used would help you. I wrote about it here:
http://littleincowes.blogspot.com.au/2011/06/in-which-we-have-poo-party-and-everyone.html
Great ideas, Susan! How great that you found a doc with a developmental slant. We seem to be going through another withholding phase and I will try some of these techniques.
Yes! Yes! Me me! I’m going through this right now with my daughter…well it’s been going for the past 6-months and I’m practically beside myself insane with it. It’s so hard to see your child in so much pain, so much FEAR over something that HAS to happen no matter how hard they squeeze those little but cheeks. I’ve lost sleep, I’ve cried. It’s been miserable. I think my child’s fear comes from pain (new little sister born 3 months ago probably isn’t helping much either). She was really constipated once and had a painful hard BM that caused her to bleed and ever since…she has withheld. She is on an every 4-day pooping schedule and by day four she is pure misery to be around (because being 2.5 years old isn’t hard enough).
I’ll have to give Dr. Heather’s advice a shot; as it sounds logical since all toddlers truly want is ‘control’. So far we have only been giving QD Miralax. Both my husband and are I health care professionals and realize this is more psychological than medical so all we can really do is wait it out and keep things ‘soft’.
But man when your kid is screaming “I don’t wanna POOP!” for an hour at the pool while all her friends play happily together near by – it’s short of heart breaking.
Julie, I’m sure you’ve heard this before, but my understanding from what I’ve read and heard is that a new sibling can be very related to withholding (toddler afraid if they poo a baby will come out…). Could be something to explore. I believe that a big part of Sasha’s fear is related to bodies and reproduction. Three of the women I hang out with most are either due any day or just had a baby and it is very much on Sasha’s mind. But, yes, this is such hard stuff! I will post more about this soon. Trying to beat a case of strep, of all things.
I can’t say enough good things about Miralax. It is a laxative, in a sense, but mostly keeps poop soft so when they do poop it doesn’t hurt (which not only hurts, but makes them not want to do it again). And its not habit forming. And it dissolves tastelessly into water or other liquids, making it VERY easy to administer. My older daughter has had an issue with pooping since she was potty trained (about 4 years ago) and Miralax is the only thing that has ever made a difference. We actually ended up in the ER once because she was in so much pain; an x-ray confirmed she was just full of shit (ha!
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When something like this is linked more to the emotions than to the physical constitution, then homeopathy can help. Miranda Castro has some good books for parents who want to practice it at home. Anxiety, fear or even anger can be a hurdle for children and the correct homeopathic remedy matched to the child’s personality can do wonders to promote a “cure” or in this case, help her to feel at peace with the whole potty thing! I’m studying to be a homeopath right now and have used it numerous times with my teens for all kinds of emotional related physical ailments.
My eldest went through a brief period of holding them in when she was potty training. I can’t remember if we did anything specific back then or whether she just sort of grew out of it. But then recently, we had some major dramas where she was holding it in for a week at a time. When she did go, she would scream and carry on, sometimes waking – screaming – multiple times a night, clearly needing to go but refusing to. There were even a couple of instances where she did a little bit in her pants at Kindy. I didn’t know what we were going to do as for her it seemed psychological – I didn’t think a laxative or suppository would work either as when they did come they seemed to be soft. Like your daughter, it was the pain of holding them in that was upsetting her, not the pain of doing them.
What worked for us was drawing up a rewards chart with stickers. She gets a sticker each time she poops, and if she gets 5 stickers in a week, at the end of the week she can choose a reward or a treat. This was something I had heard of people using for potty training but I thought it might help her to stop whatever negative association she had formed about doing her poops. As soon as we started the chart, all the screaming and tantruming over doing poos stopped, and she has gone back to doing them every day. It was amazing how quickly it worked, even I wasn’t expecting it to be so successful. And she still says with wonder, every time she does one “Mummy, that didn’t even hurt!”
[...] Hillary Frank experienced this poop-in-the-tub problem with her own child, and WROTE A BLOG POST ABOUT IT. The problem, however, was not the tub poo. It was the [...]