Children who are at school and who soil themselves
frequently are almost certain to have accidents in the classroom. For most kids with encopresis, and their
parents, this is likely to be one of the most stressful aspects of the condition. No child past nursery age wants to poo their
pants in front of their peers, particularly not on a repeated basis, and be
awarded nicknames such as ‘class baby’ or ‘stinky kid.’ Yet this can be the reality for some of the
thousands of children who suffer from soiling problems.
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| Soiling can lead to a child being teased or isolated at school, even when she is clean. (c) |
Schools can vary a great deal in how they deal with
pupils who soil. The best schools employ
staff who are willing to change young children out of soiled pants, provide
private toilet facilities, devise a signal for a child to give if they need to
leave the classroom quickly and work with parents to maintain a child’s dignity
and assist them with their continence issues.
At the other end of the spectrum are schools who force parents to leave their
place of work and come into school to change their child, refuse to allow
children access to the toilet during lessons, blame parents for not potty
training their child properly and even suspend pupils for having accidents.
I was amazingly lucky in that soiling caused me
very few problems at infant school, even though I was having a lot of accidents
elsewhere at the time. While I sometimes
went home in slightly (for me!) dirty pants, I only ever had one major accident at
school. Was this because I was more
likely to use the toilets at school than at home? Not a bit of it! I can’t recall a single occasion when I
opened my bowel in the toilet at infant school, I would simply withhold my poo
while sitting in my seat and then carry on working. In fact, as I had a relatively strong bladder
for a child and went home at lunchtimes, I rarely used the school toilets at
all.
 |
| I hardly ever visited the school toilets during my years at infant school, and never once sat on one to do a poo. (c) |
But I was again remarkably lucky: no-one discovered
that I’d had an accident. Nobody, child
or adult, remarked on the odour I was carrying around with me, either during
the remainder of our time at the centre or on the coach back to the school
where our parents were waiting for us.
With her well-trained nose, however, my mother knew straight away when I
got off the coach that I had soiled my pants.
I told her that there were no toilets at the centre. Not surprisingly, she didn’t believe me. Walking home with a friend of my mother and
her daughter, my mother tried to explain the fact that I smelt of poo by
telling her friend that I didn’t wipe my bottom properly. It was probably no more convincing than my
own lie.
If my accident had been discovered then I would
have received a stern response. My
teacher was rather strict and was unsympathetic when it came to her pupils
having toilet accidents. The previous
Christmas one girl, whom I shall call Melanie, wet her pants during a rehearsal
for the school nativity play. The whole
class were sat together back in the classroom when the puddle on the stage was
discovered. ‘Melanie, have you wet
yourself?’ called out our teacher as soon as she entered the room. When the girl said ‘no’, our teacher
demanded, ‘Let me feel your pants.’
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| Aged 6, I withheld my poo at infant school but avoided soiling myself in the classroom. |
Even today, the thought of my Year 2 teacher
calling out, ‘James, have you pooed yourself?’, before checking my pants in
front of the whole class and declaring them to be messy fills me with horror.
Sadly, many other children are not so lucky when it comes to avoiding soiling at school. Dimity Telfer's worst experience of soiling herself happened at her school when she was 13, which she describes in her blog post: My Worst Day With Encopresis.
James, Your Blog Has Me In tears. I can not imagine the humiliation. My enco 5 Yr old is starting School NEXT Week and I'm SO worried. Thank you for your honesty.
ReplyDeleteThank you for your comment, Jennifer, and for reading my blog. If you have not already done so, I would urge you to speak to your child's teacher about their soiling; some schools are really good at helping children with continence problems. Fingers crossed, your child may be lucky like I was and have few problems at school.
DeleteI was not as luckily I had many accidents while at school. I smelled and many kids in class would notice when we were close in line. I would hear them say. Yuk who farted or it smells like poop. I knew it was me smelling and I would play it off as nothing.
ReplyDeleteThen one day I must have been on strong laxatives that really made me go and of course I just did what I always did soil my pants. This time it must have shown through my light blue jeans. A few girls in my class must have saw it between my legs. They could not stop laughing. They called me poopie boy. They would just look at me and laugh at me for almost the rest of the school year.
This really hurt me deeply. I was 12 years old and the laughing stock of the 6th grade. It took me years to ever want to go out with any person. I avoided girls that liked me in High School. I thought they would still laugh at me. I finally got around that but still I get flash backs to that embarrassing year. This still today makes me feel uneasy around people. Anxiety you might say....
That must have been really hard for you, Eric, and I can understand why you avoided girls for so long after your accident. Soiling yourself at school and being discovered is a traumatic experience for any child, especially for a 12 year old, and many children are not very forgiving and seem to have long memories when it comes to teasing a classmate for a toilet accident.
DeleteSadly, many children with encopresis have to face this humiliation on a regular basis. I still cannot believe how lucky I was in avoiding major accidents in the classroom.
I was never actually diagnosed with ADD or encopresis but that combination would have fitted me during school, especially up until I was 12. There wouldn’t have been a week I didn’t go home from school with soiled underwear at least 2 or 3 times. It seemed like none of the other students did it and no matter how hard I tried it still kept happening and only seemed to get worse, like my body was trying to embarrass me or punish me. The other students bullying and constant hounding didn’t help my situation and probably make it worse.
ReplyDeleteNo matter how hard I tied nothing changed so I eventually gave up and thought I was going to be the only student that couldn’t keep their underwear clean. When primary school finished and my holidays started I got determined to finally stop and didn’t have an accident the entire holiday break. That made me feel really proud of myself and by the time High school started I was sure I had finally got control of my body.
The first day of high school I wanted all the students in my grade that that bullied me to know I had stopped and proudly stood up for myself when they started their usual sole destroying comments. Unfortunately they were right and I was wrong and it wasn’t long before my underwear was once again soiled.
During my walk home from school that afternoon all I could think about was how much I had failed with my promise to myself.
I also couldn't go potty at school ever,wound up with constipation,so by age 13,I had to get weekly Fleet enemas from my step mom.
DeleteI became Dependant on her enemas it continued every week til I was 22.(I always waited till rest of family was gone in the morning to ask mom for enema)
Mom noticed my underwear were always stained when I took them off for the enemas.
She took me to doctor he said I had mega colon from holding 3 to 6 days at time.
Back them (1970s)enemas were the only treatment, so doc told my mom give me enemas, if I didn't go potty by day3.
Mom kept a bm diary to keep track,I got over 400 enemas age 13 to 22,
I wonder if I got addicted to her enemas.
Now I'm a single dad with 15 year old daughter, who has severe constipation, I have to give her fleet mineral oil enemas once a week also
Is constipation hereditary?
Hi, sorry to hear that you also had bowel problems when you were younger and couldn't use the school bathrooms. I have never had an enema, but I know that these are still often used to treat constipation.
DeleteSorry also that your daughter has severe constipation and you have to give her enemas, I hope that she is soon able to overcome this. I don't think there's evidence to suggest that constipation or encopresis is hereditary. Through the internet I know of thousands of parents whose children have bowel problems, and only a handful had encopresis themselves, which suggests that this is down to coincidence rather than genetics.
Hi Anonymous,
ReplyDeleteAt least your step mom helped you deal with your situation.
I was easily distracted by anything going on around me, especially if it was something new and exciting. That usually meant I either didn’t pay attention to my body or just ignored it if it meant having to go to the toilets at school or anywhere else other than home. The only time I remember getting in trouble for it from my mother was when I did it at home, which wasn’t very often. Her solution was to sew additional thick material layers in my underwear which mostly worked at disguising my problem but didn’t help me deal with it
Now that I’m older and understand bodily functions I realized the reason I had so many accidents during primary and the first two years of high school was constipation from withholding the need to go. Like a lot of kids, I was always constipation but avoiding using the toilets at school made it much worse. When I tried go at home the logs were so big it hurt, but I also realized letting it come out by itself didn’t. The problem with that was it was almost always during class or while I was out doing something on the weekend. My parents just thought I was lazy or doing it on purpose and I believed my body was different to everyone else. My logs were always big and very firm and without much odor, so I usually just kept wearing my underwear until I got home. The only time I changed them at school or during the day on weekends was if a teacher or someone said something but that hardly ever happened. Either they didn’t know or didn’t want to say anything. That didn’t help my situation worse my convincing my parents I was doing it on purpose.
ReplyDeleteThankfully, I didn’t suffer from encopresis as a boy, because the one time I did soil my pants happened to be in kindergarten (age 5), and that was traumatic enough. I refused to use the toilet at school that day, despite the fact that I was well aware that my body was ready for a bowel movement. There were a few reasons why this occurred. When sitting on the toilet, I liked to take my time (in school, we were expected to be in and out, as others were waiting to use the toilet as well); also, I was somewhat afraid of the split toilet seat in the classroom lavatory (being very small, falling in and being flushed away seemed quite plausible); and finally, I felt completely confident that I could hold myself until I got home. It never crossed my mind that messing my pants was even a possibility, as I had no memories of this ever happening to me previously. Unfortunately, fifty years ago it was considered perfectly acceptable for a teacher to call attention to child’s accident without any concern for his dignity. Perhaps they thought public humiliation was an effective deterrent to any future accidents, or maybe a warning to other students to not be so careless. Whatever the reason, I became an object of contempt and ridicule among my peers. This deep sense of failure affected my self confidence for years after the incident, which prevented me from establishing any lasting childhood friendships.
ReplyDeleteI am sorry that happened to you, and that it had such a long-lasting detrimental effect on your childhood. As you can see from my blog post, my own teacher when I was 7 thought nothing of humiliating a girl in my class after she wet her pants, and I'm sure she would have done a similar thing to me if she'd discovered that I'd messed myself at school.
DeleteThanks, James. It’s striking how a seemingly trivial incident of a young child’s poor decision making one day in 1972, can remain with him for a lifetime. Throughout my life, whenever I’ve felt embarrassed by something, I’m reminded of my five-year-old self walking home from school with a load in his pants. Nevertheless, I was blessed to have very loving parents. It was my Dad who cleaned me up that day, and never made me feel any shame at home for what I had done, nor even mentioned it ever again. My parents had no idea what I was experiencing at school, for if they had, I’m sure at least my mother would have bent my teacher’s ear over it. On the upside, I have on the whole had a happy life, and curiously much as you have described yourself as a child, have always had a very creative imagination. All the best to you in your efforts to help children and families.
DeleteThank you for sharing your story, and for your kind wishes.
DeleteNowadays in the very litigious USA it is completely unacceptable to intentionally embarrass a student who has had an accident; the school may be sued and the teacher certainly fired. However, many years ago when I was a boy, humiliation seemed to be the order of the day. One afternoon in the first grade as I was about to leave the lavatory, another boy grabbed my arm and gleefully pointed out, “Look! Freddie’s cleaning up his baffroom!” (Not his actual name). Under the door to the stall, I could clearly see Freddie’s weeping face, red as a tomato, as he was desperately trying to clean up his feces off the tile floor with a handful of toilet tissue. As my family had only recently moved to this town, no one knew that I had suffered public humiliation in my previous school for having pooped my pants the year before. Thus, I found no amusement in Freddie’s plight, but indeed felt sorry for him. However, seeing this also frightened me, so I didn’t think for a second to try to help him or alert an adult to come to his aid. Back in the classroom we were all sitting quietly at our desks working on some assignment. For some reason the teacher divided the room with all the boys on the right, and the girls on the left. Suddenly, the teacher stood up and loudly exclaimed, “Uh oh! Someone went to the bathroom in his pants!” Freddie’s desk was up front right next to hers, so she asked him first, “Was it you, Freddie?” He responded in abject horror, “NO!” So she questioned a couple other boys—thinking back, she reminded me of the big-nosed Child Catcher of Vulgaria sniffing around for children in the movie, “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.” The other boys responded with the exact same horrified, “NO!” It strikes me now by everyone’s same response, that as awful as it is to poop your pants, it is far better being messy and getting away with it, than being clean and having people believe you had. With no one willing to confess stinking up her classroom, she said, “Well, I guess I’ll just have to line up all the boys, and take each one of you into the lavatory, and check your pants until I find out who did it.” She then sat back down at her desk, and I resumed working on my assignment. Within seconds, her loud voice bellowed out, “SO YOU DID GO TO THE BATHROOM IN YOUR PANTS! Why did you say you hadn’t when I asked you before?” There was poor Freddie, looking downcast and thoroughly humiliated, standing by her desk. He likely thought that he could avoid the public embarrassment of having her check his pants by quietly telling her that he was the one. As with my experience the year before, there were no further steps taken to change his pants and clean him up; he would have to return to his desk and complete the day in messy underwear. The only object of the exercise was to shame him in front of the entire class. However, unlike my experience, I never saw anyone exclude or make fun of Freddie for his accident. Our last year in that school was the eighth grade, and my classmates tended to reminisce about things at that time. Once one boy that year jokingly referred to Freddie’s accident, which made him quite angry; at different time another boy mentioned our first grade teacher, and Freddie responded, “I hate her!” I didn’t have encopresis, and I doubt that Freddie did either, but even that one shot isn’t so easy to laugh off. I’m now 60, and haven’t run into Freddie for twenty years, but that teacher lives in my town and I see her all the time. Except for sharing this story here, I’ve never mentioned this to anyone.
ReplyDeletePoor Freddie, that was awful what happened to him, but at least the other kids were nicer to him than the teacher had been. If I still saw that teacher, I think that I would have to tell her that I thought she was mean and cruel to humiliate a student in that way.
DeleteWhile her treatment of Freddie all those years ago was definitely unjust, I don’t see much point in confronting her about it now, especially since she is an elderly woman, though remarkably spry for her age. That single incident with Freddie was actually the only mean thing I ever saw her do. Those were also very different times with no policies or even recommended sensitive ways to deal with the occasional incontinent student. Most of the teachers were childless, single women, who probably never changed a diaper in their lives, let alone knew how to assist a child wearing soiled underwear. There were no classroom aides nor a school nurse back then. The only other school staff besides a solitary teacher for each classroom full of thirty-five children apiece, was the principal, her secretary, and an old toothless guy (likely an alcoholic) who worked as the school janitor. Doing the math, the adult to child ratio that was standard then wouldn’t even be legal now. Teachers could berate, demean, ridicule and even physically strike a child, all the while it would never occur to us kids to complain to our parents about it. Compared to some of the really scary unhinged child-loathing battleaxes that mystifyingly were ever hired to be teachers back then, my first grade teacher was nicer than many, despite how insensitive she was to poor Freddie that one afternoon.
DeleteBoth with Freddie and with me when I was in kindergarten the year before, we amazingly for such young children mustered the ability to hide our true emotions in a desperate attempt to keep hidden from our classmates the fact that we had pooped our pants like little babies. I’m sure our teachers, who typically saw their emotionally fragile students cry about all sorts of things, misread our stony silence as utter indifference to having soiling ourselves, as you so well explain as the “Don’t Care Attitude.” Using humiliation was most likely thought to be the corrective to make us care. I was impressed that Freddie had the courage to go to the teacher’s desk and actually tell her what he had done. When it happened to me, I was too deeply ashamed to say anything—like your mother always did with you, my teacher took me into the lavatory and checked my pants, as I stood there appearing silently oblivious to the smelly load I was carrying behind me. Even when I got home and went straight to my mother to help me end the living nightmare I was enduring (I really had no clue how to get poop out of my underpants), the sheer embarrassment kept me from being able to say anything beyond repeating the first person pronoun a couple of times. While my guilty demeanor was evident, my mother was likely nose-blind to my stench due to my baby brother still in diapers at the time. All I could do was to pull down my pants and show her the whole horrible mess.
You've obviously thought about this a great deal. I hope that in schools today a child would not be humiliated like the six-year old girl in my class who wet herself. I still shudder to think of what I could have expected from that teacher if she had ever found out that I had pooed my pants in her classroom. Today there are teaching assistants in each class in British schools, so hopefully a young child would not be left in wet or dirty underwear.
DeleteOur ways of coping with having soiling accidents seem to be similar, but you were clearly braver than me as I could never admit to my mother, or anyone else, what I had done.
Perhaps I overthink things. The fact that some of these events from my childhood remain so vivid in my memory while others have been completely forgotten causes me to ponder their significance all the more. I find myself trying now to identify the feelings that I was unable to comprehend as the events were unfolding while at the same time still try to be as objective as I can be about the overall situation. Soiling my pants in kindergarten was kind of a landmark catastrophe in my early life that instilled certain fears that tend to shape the whole of my personality. It is an embarrassing story that is not easy to share, and your blog where you have shared so much of your personal experience, even answering all kinds of random questions about it, gives me a little courage to share my own.
DeleteI do not consider myself at all brave, as a child or even now. This is evidenced by my posting anonymously. It was close to the end of the school year, I had just finished my breakfast and was getting dressed. I felt the desire for a bowel movement, which I would have normally just gone upstairs and taken care of it, except that my mother was hurrying me along because apparently we were running late. That’s when I made the bad decision to “withhold” it until I returned from school. Kindergarten was just a morning session in those days, and this particular morning was going to be even shorter than usual. Just before snack time, the teacher called each of us forward individually to take our turn using the toilet. When it was my turn, I lied and said I didn’t have to go (no one ever did this). She tried to coax me, but when I heard some of my classmates giggling at me, I felt quite self conscious and became all the more adamant. She wasn’t going to get into a battle of wills with a five-year-old, so she let me return to my seat. She gave each of us a little cup of red fruit punch which I swallowed right down. It must have acted as an instant laxative, because I felt my bowels begin to move completely against my will. In a panic, I quickly shoved my hand down into my underpants to prevent my poop from coming out, then immediately withdrew it as I found out the hard way there was no stopping this force of nature. Not only were my briefs totally filled as you described yours had been the one time you purposely pooped your pants, but it was all over the palm of my hand as well. Amazingly, no one noticed my ordeal; all the other children were getting up from the tables to go over to the other side of the room where the teacher was to play the piano while they danced the way she taught us. It never occurred to me to just slip into the lavatory and clean off my hand, so I did a truly awful thing. I smeared the mess onto the seat of the chair next to my own, where my friend Buddy (all names are changed) had been seated. Buddy was a nice boy, but a little slow witted, and I would have certainly let the poor kid take the blame for my accident, had it not been discovered until after we all left for the day. Nevertheless, just as we were all lined up to go out the door—nearly having got away with my deceit—another student saw the chair and alerted the teacher. She called Buddy out of line, took him into the lavatory to check his pants, then emerged declaring that it wasn’t him. Next she called me, and of course the guilty verdict was announced.
I stated before there were no repercussions at home for this; once cleaned up, I could resume my life as though it never happened. However, in school the next day when we began with playtime, I went over to the shelves with the wooden blocks to play with Johnny and Buddy as we usually did together, Johnny quite angrily declared, “You can’t play us because you poop in your pants!” Buddy, who should have been truly the more offended of the two, said nothing, but just looked a bit sad. This was devastating, so I decidedly not to seek out any other playmates for fear of the same rejection. Sitting down at a table by myself to draw a picture, across from me at another table were a couple boys with whom I never really connected, and they were giggling, pointing at me, while repeatedly whispering loud enough for me to hear, “Poops his pants! Poops his pants!” Just before snack time when it was my turn to use the toilet, the teacher used extra emphasis when she called my name, eliciting all kinds of giggles from my amused classmates.
DeleteI don’t remember much about the following week, except that it was the last week of school, and my sixth birthday happened to be that Tuesday. I remember my classmates dutifully singing “Happy Birthday” before I walked around with a box of cupcakes my mother baked, and seeing their faces as each child took one, staring at me in a curious way, surely not friendly but not really mean either, just like I was an odd stranger to them: the boy who pooped his pants.
Before my family moved later that year, I actually attended another school for first grade for only about a month. There was only one child from my kindergarten class that was also in my first grade class there, and it was Johnny who still quite clearly resented me. In my brief time there, three children had accidents on different days (it was approached somewhat differently there than what happened with Freddie or me if you’d like to hear about it), and each time I’d glance across the room at Johnny, who was always staring daggers at me.
One would think moving to another state where nobody knew me would have provided a fresh start, but I unfortunately didn’t find the children there to be particularly welcoming, and the incident from kindergarten became more internalized in me as my terrible secret. I was always afraid that someone would learn about my dark past as though I was a former Nazi in hiding after the war; and I was even more afraid that one day I might unexpectedly poop my pants again repeating the whole nightmare. One really strange thing too that comes to mind, for about a year after my accident, every time I felt myself about to pass gas, I’d reach inside my underpants in case it was poop instead of a fart, to try and stop it from escaping, even though I knew full well that doesn’t work. Thankfully, I didn’t poop my pants again.
It is only as an adult that I have been able to rationalise and understand my soiling problems as a child. I think all children do things which, from an adult perspective, seem to be quite silly. In my case this included withholding for many years, even when I knew it would result in accidents in my pants, and in your case not going to the bathroom when you knew you needed to poop, and trying to stop it with your hand even though you knew this wouldn't work.
DeleteI'm sorry you got teased like that after the humiliation of your accident. Unfortunately, children are not always sympathetic and understanding. As far as I know, 'Melanie' wasn't teased after her wetting accident was revealed by the teacher, and I don't think 'Holly' ("A Pooey Bum at Nursery" post) suffered in that way either after she pooed her pants, although I think she was lucky that it was me, and not another classmate, who saw her being changed.
I still think you are brave, as I could never have pulled down my underwear voluntarily and shown my mother the mess I had made, although I often got shouted at and scolded when I soiled myself, and I'm glad that you seemed to avoid this at home.
I know that toilet accidents in children are more common than a lot of people think, but for three children to have accidents in one month does seem a lot. I hope this school didn't humiliate them, like happened to you and Freddie.
Thank you for sharing, and I hope that writing about your experiences has helped you to come to terms with them, in a similar way that it has helped me.