SO MANY CHILDREN

Aged 14, I no longer soiled
myself, but the feelings of
shame from my childhood
habit remained.

As I said in my previous post Why I Pooed My Pants, when I was a child I thought I was the only school aged boy in the world who dirtied his pants. This belief stayed with me for a long time after I stopped soiling as I never heard of any other child who did this and it was something that was never mentioned on TV.

This changed when I happened by chance to see a letter in the problem pages of a magazine which began, ‘my son would be a very nice boy but for one thing. He can't be made not to dirty his pants.’ I couldn't believe it, reading the whole of the letter I could have been reading about myself! The advice given was terrible, suggesting they make the boy wear the same soiled pants day after day, but suddenly I realised I might not have been alone.

I started looking at problem pages more regularly, seeing if there were other children who had similar problems and soon came across a 6 year old girl who had had a bout of illness and ‘ever since then she's messed her knickers’ and a 5 year old boy who hated pooing in the toilet and ‘often soils his pants.’ These were all fairly young children, but then I read a letter from a concerned Mum whose 11 year old daughter regularly soiled herself and ‘when I ask her why she does it she says she doesn't know.’  Like me she had some days when she didn't have accidents and others when she did full bowel movements in her pants. I imagine most readers would condemn her as a lazy child who needed a good talking to and a firm hand, but I felt sorry for her, knowing exactly what she was going through. It was almost like I had found a kindred spirit for my younger self.

Of course, I still wasn't proud of what I had done in my pants as a child or what I'd put my parents through, but at last I started to feel that I wasn't a freak, especially when I discovered that the condition had a name: encopresis.  It was an important first step to confronting my past.

Having come across these examples of children who also soiled their pants like I had, I still felt that it was something which very, very few children suffered from, as I had never come across any parents personally who said that their child had this problem or been in the company of an older child who had an accident.

Soiling can be a devastating problem for
any child and their parents. (c)

And then the internet came along and I discovered just how widespread the problem was. So many children having soiling problems, some of them much worse than me, having accidents every day, sometimes several times a day. Children who were still having problems into their teens or even older, and who were having accidents at school or round the houses of their friends or at family gatherings. I felt so sorry for them, it must be so dreadful to stink of poo around your family or peers, and for their parents who were in some cases at the point of despair, unable to understand why their child couldn't just use the toilet like everybody else.

While I will probably never lose the guilt about how many times my mother had to clean me up and the heartache I put her through, I no longer feel disgusted about soiling myself. It may have started through laziness but it was never deliberate and eventually I was able to overcome it. I only hope that other children can do the same.

For a blog about soiling from the point of view of a parent, why not visit Extended Potty Training, written by a mother whose son was still wetting and soiling his pants when he was five, in spite of more than two years of trying to potty train him, and was eventually diagnosed with encopresis.

WHY I POOED MY PANTS

This is a slightly amended version of the post on my first blog, in which I wrote in detail for the first time about my childhood soiling.

Aged 3 and still in nappies.

My toilet troubles began at an early age.  Potty training was a slow process for me and I didn't come out of nappies until I was three and a half years old.  But though I was ‘dry’, I was still not completely ‘clean’ and often messed my pants.  This occurred between the ages of 3 and 11, although it was worst up to the age of 7.  It happened because I often avoided going to the toilet when I felt the need to poo.  Instead I would clench my bottom and breath inwards and wait for the need to pass.  If I felt the urge again I would repeat the process. I freely admit that withholding began as an act of laziness on my part, not wanting to stop playing in order to attend to my bodily needs, but it was never an act of naughtiness.  I didn't deliberately go in my pants, but I would soil myself sometime later because of my failure to use the toilet earlier. I never felt myself actually pooing, I just became aware later that my pants were messy.

It was a long time before I made the connection between avoiding using the toilet and having dirty pants, because the need to poo seemed to go away when I ignored it, making me believe that I had made my poo disappear.  This was different to the feeling of a full bladder which, if I did not go to the toilet straight away, would gradually get stronger until eventually I wet my pants, something which I never did after my toddler years.  Because of the time lapse between avoiding using the bathroom and soiling myself, I really don’t think I made the connection between the two events for a quite a while. 

A typical withholding position for me
when I needed a poo and decided
not to go to the toilet. (c)

For a long time I had wanted to stop soiling myself but didn’t know how to do it. Once I had made the connection I then made more of an effort to start using the toilet when I knew I needed to poo. It wasn’t easy as avoiding going to the toilet had become quite a habit, and there were times when I still did it. However, before my 8th birthday I was mostly clean, other than on trips as I disliked using public toilets for bowel movements.  My very last accident occurred on holiday at the age of 11.  By that stage I had suffered the embarrassment of being messy and smelly, and gone through the humiliation of being changed by my mother, more times than I would wish to remember.  I had put my parents through a lot of worry and heartache, not to mention some horrible laundry and clean-ups, and I had been shouted at and told off on numerous occasions.  But at least the nightmare was over and I could forget about this awful chapter of my childhood.

I thought at the time, and for a long time afterwards, that I was the only child in the world who dirtied his pants.  But I was later to discover that this was not the case...

To read about soiling from the point of view of a girl sufferer, take a look at this blog post from Dimity Telfer: The Story of My Life

INTRODUCTION

In December 2012 I nervously hit the ‘publish’ button on my latest blog post.  I was about to tell the world (well, anyone who cared to read it!) about something which I had always thought I would never tell anyone, something which I considered to be my shameful childhood secret.  I was about to reveal that I frequently soiled myself as a child, and had carried on doing this until I was 11 years old.

For many years I had believed that people would think the same as me, that frequently pooing my pants when I was well past potty

The words are spoken by a fictional character,
but they could have come from my own mouth.

training age was a babyish and disgusting thing to do, and would judge me accordingly.  This was reinforced by the fact that for so many years I had thought that I was the only school aged child in the world that did this.  Although I later became aware that this was not the case, it was still something that I kept quiet about, a part of my past that was best kept secret.

My discovery, via the internet, of just how many children and young people regularly soiled themselves convinced me to open up and tell my story, in the hope that it might help some of them to understand that they were not alone in having this problem, and for the benefit of the many parents who were struggling to cope with their children’s soiling.  In the previous few years I had posted on internet parenting forums about my experiences, but this was the first time I had told my story in a blog post that would include my full name and photographs.

Fortunately the response from parents was positive, many thanking me for sharing my history and, in particular, finding comfort from the fact that I had eventually stopped soiling my pants.  I was not plagued by any internet trolls and no-one was judgemental or disgusted about what I had done as a child.  The post was also consistently the one with the most hits on my blog.

The covers of my books
for children who soil.

In 2014 I published a book for older children who soil, called A Child Like You, partly based on my own experiences and have recently republished this in separate editions for boys and girls, called A Boy Like You and A Girl Like You. 

Now I have decided that the time has come to start a new blog, this time concentrating on the subject of childhood soiling, which is still often considered a taboo subject in ‘the real world’.  I plan to write in greater detail about my experiences through a series of posts, which may be TMI for some people but I have found that being frank and candid about my childhood toilet problems is appreciated by parents of children who soil.  This blog will not continue indefinitely, when I had said everything I have to say I will stop posting, but the blog will remain to hopefully help future sufferers cope with the distressing condition that is encopresis.

Finally, please note that I live in the UK and will be using British terminology in this blog, but I’m sure American readers will be able to translate ‘pants’ into ‘underwear’!  There will be several childhood photographs of myself, but other pictures are posed by models.  These images, which are marked '(c)', are copyright and used under licence.

For more information on childhood soiling and constipation, and other continence issues in children such as bedwetting, daytime wetting and potty training, why not visit the website of the charity ERIC who specialise in helping with these problems.