Afraid to poop - Help!

My DD is 3 and potty trained pretty quickly within 3 days. She was doing both poop and pee with no issues whatsoever the last 2 weeks. This is week 3 and she's all of a sudden "afraid" to poop. She tells me she's scared and now she's withholding. It will take her hours on and off the bowl to poop and it's a fight. I'm trying all different bribes and nothing is working. Why now, in week 3, is she suddenly afraid? Any suggestions? We praise her and make a big deal when she finally does poop and she even says next day. "see? that wasn't so scary!" but it's the same routine the next day. I'm trying reeeeeallly hard to not lose my cool with her, but it's really hard especially when we are out somewhere and she's literally having to go to the potty every 3 minutes bc she feels the need to poop, just to refuse as soon as we get in the bathroom.

Afraid to poop - Help!

DD was the same way! I just stopped stressing it and kept telling her that when she has to go it's gotta be on the potty. She would run back and forth and then when it would start to happen she would get nervous and say she didn't have to go. Eventually, she pooped. She continued the behavior one or two more times but that was it. She told me she thought her butt would fall in lol

Afraid to poop - Help!

U’re doing the right thing. Patience is the key with potty training, seriously! They just need time and once we lose our cool,m and start getting anxious and frustrated cause they’re not getting it, they’ll feed from that energy and will just cause more problems. It happened to me with my first one. Best piece of advise I can give u...be patient, I know it sucks, but just give it time and keep doing what u’re doing =)

Afraid to poop - Help!

We went through the exact same thing in January. She was 2.5. She was doing great but I could tell she hated pooping. She told me she didn’t like it. During week 3 she must have withheld so much that we ended up at Urgent Care. I thought she had a UTI but turns out she was severely constipated. My ped told me not to force it and traumatize her bc she obviously had very strong feelings about even sitting on the toilet to even pee at that point. We dropped the potty training and tried again 4 months later. She did 100 times better. I would make sure to give her something like miralax to help soften her poop. Good luck!

Message edited 7/15/2019 1:03:02 PM.

Re: Afraid to poop - Help!

my dd would shit in her pants until 4 years old.
She was pee trained practically overnight with no issue. Never an accident, even at night.
She just refused to poop in the potty. Just flat out. Would go in a corner and poop in whatever she was wearing, pull up, underwear, whatever. Then come to me crying, POOOOOOOOOPIE! I can't tell you how many pairs of underwear we had to throw out.
I tried everything... reward charts, bribes, reasoning, miralax, you name it. Nothing worked.

It's very common. When i was going through it, it seemed a ton of other people said they had the same issue.

One day at just turned 4, she got up, went to the potty, pooped and that was it. She never had an issue again.
I have no idea what happened or what clicked.
But man was I thrilled! LOL

Re: Afraid to poop - Help!

Is she constipated?

Afraid to poop - Help!

My daughter had the same issue. She potty trained almost immediately and after a couple of days was afraid to poop. She would cry when she had to go poop etc. She started holding it in and was constipated. I had to give her a baby enema.. she eventually started using t he potty after a couple of weeks.

Re: Afraid to poop - Help!

Message edited 7/16/2019 3:07:27 PM.

Re: Afraid to poop - Help!

Afraid to poop - Help!

Thank you all for the replies. It's helpful to know I'm not alone in this. We had been giving her Miralax before potty training because she was having a hard time pooping all of a sudden. But that made her go 6-8 times a day and I was only giving her a half dose every other day. We stopped giving the Miralax bc then she couldn't hold her poop at all and she was going an insane amount of times and her tush was all red & raw.

She has her moments, but I've relented and she's been pooping in her panties here and there. She wears a diaper at night bc she is not ready for night training yet as she wakes up wet most mornings. She won't poop in her diaper either, so she just has to work it out. We're doing our best!

Re: Afraid to poop - Help!