After reading my headline, you probably thought that either my 6-year-old has some kind of physical disability or some kind of mental condition that prevents him from understanding how to use the potty. Or maybe you thought that my son must have some pretty inept parents for him not to be potty trained by the age of 6. Well, all of those thoughts would be wrong.
Let me start by saying that my son is a normal, happy, wonderful 6-year-old. He is doing great in kindergarten, he is very compassionate with other children, and he listens well (most of the time, anyway). He is a bright spot in my life and is an amazingly smart boy. Yes, I know I’m a little bit biased here, but I just needed to paint the picture of a well-adjusted, happy-go-lucky little boy. If it weren’t for his potty issue, he wouldn’t have a care in the world.
So what is his potty issue, then? Is it simply potty-training gone awry? Lazy parenting? No…it is a condition called Encopresis. Ever heard of it? We hadn’t, at least until a couple of months ago.
My husband and I had thought, for the last 2 years, that our son had just been stubborn about using the potty. He was fully trained for urinating in the potty, but as far as bowel movements go, he just wouldn’t go in the potty. There had been about a 2-week period back when he was almost 4 years old when he had used the potty for BM’s–so, in our minds, that proved to us that he was capable of doing it. Every day, though, he had at least a couple of ‘accidents.’ Every day he had to change clothes a couple of times because he had soiled himself. We were quite frustrated by the whole thing, frankly.
Thinking that our son was just not willing to use the potty, we dreamed up all kinds of tactics to try to encourage him–we tried reward systems, we tried taking away his favorite toys, we tried buying him new underwear that he really liked. We tried just about everything under the sun–if you have thought about it, we have tried it, believe me. Nothing worked.
Every time we took our son in to see the pediatrician for anything, regardless of the reason, I always mentioned how he was still having this potty issue. And, the pediatrician shrugged it off every single time, saying it was a phase and to try adding more fiber and prune juice into our son’s diet. So, trusting souls that we were, that’s what we did. We went home, added the prune juice and increased the fiber in his diet, and continued trying various potty-training tactics.
Of course, this whole time our son was quite frustrated and upset by the whole issue as well. He kept telling us that he couldn’t help it, that he didn’t know why he was doing it, things like that. But since we believed our pediatrician and thought that this was a phase of his potty-training, we lectured him and took away privileges. During the two years we went on like this, our son’s younger brother became completely potty-trained–something which further cemented in our minds that our older son was just being stubborn. After all, if his younger brother could do it, why couldn’t he? We were careful not to speak about this to him, but we could tell it upset him nonetheless.
Due to an unrelated issue, I had been seeing a therapist during this time. I happened to mention the problem our son was having with the potty, and she said that it sounded like it could be Encopresis to her. I had no idea what that was, so she explained. Basically, it is a condition in which a child (more commonly boys) after the age of 4 soils himself two or more times a week due to chronic constipation. Apparently the condition is brought on when a child gets constipated and it hurts to use the potty. So, the next time they need to use the potty, they think that it is going to hurt again, and they try to hold it in again and again. Eventually this causes an impaction in the bowel and leakage (the soiling) starts to occur around the impaction. It gets to the point where the child cannot control the leakage and does not even realize at times that it is happening. The condition is curable, but can take up to a year or two to get the bowel back in shape.
I was flabbergasted. There was an actual physical reason why our son was having this problem! At my therapist’s suggestion, I immediately made an appointment with a child counselor to help our son with the emotional aspects of this condition. We also immediately switched to a different pediatrician, a much better one. I am still very angry with the previous pediatrician for not noticing this condition…it seems to me that if my therapist (who is not medically trained, by the way) knew about this condition, certain a pediatrician should have! And if he had noticed the problem, we could have begun treating it much sooner…
Our son is still dealing with this problem, and likely will be for at least the next year or so. He has to take strong medicine every night to try to get his bowels trained to go at a certain time so that he can avoid having the leakage problems. But, he still has many accidents. This week he had to come home early from school because of an accident. And, one day when we were out shopping we had to return home twice to clean him up. This is definitely not easy…but, it is easier since we know the reason for the problem.
Thankfully, our son is not getting teased at school or in the neighborhood about this. I think that the other children do not quite realize when he has an accident sometimes since his soiling is not usually very extreme–perhaps they think he has simply passed gas (which, at his age, is a source of comedy among children). But, by seeing a child counselor we are taking proactive measures in case teasing ever becomes an issue. The counselor has also been very helpful in assisting our son in relaxing about the potty–after two years of this problem, he has developed quite a lot of anxiety about using the potty.
As for me and my husband, though, we still feel pretty guilty. For two years we were treating this as a potty-training issue, taking away privileges when our son soiled himself instead of getting to the potty. It feels horrible to know that he couldn’t help it, to know that it was a physical problem beyond his control. Yes, we couldn’t have known, since neither my husband nor myself are doctors. But we still feel as if we treated him unfairly that whole time, because we did. Hopefully, though, we can all now move on and get this problem solved.
