ERIC - THE CHILDREN'S BOWEL & BLADDER CHARITY

There are many excellent charities operating in the UK and across the world.  Everyone has their favourite, often based on personal experience or circumstances.  There are many charities I admire, particularly those working to improve the lives of children, such as the NSPCC and Barnardos.  But without doubt my favourite charity is ERIC – The Children’s Bowel & Bladder Charity, a small UK based charity which does brilliant work in an unglamorous area.

ERIC provides a lifeline for parents
 being driven potty by their child's
wetting or soiling problems (c)

Set up by The Children’s Society in 1988, ERIC, which now stands for Education and Resources for Improving Childhood Continence, originally specialised in helping families to deal with bedwetting in children and teenagers, but has since expanded to cover other toilet problems in young people such as daytime wetting, constipation and soiling. 

From its offices in Bristol in the west of England, ERIC’s helpline, website and publications are a lifeline for parents and children dealing with continence issues.  Wetting and soiling issues in children and teenagers are a distressing problem for the young person concerned as well as for their parents, who often feel unable to discuss their child’s condition with their families and friends, and sometimes also have difficulty dealing with the medical profession.  ERIC’s helpline, in particular, is a great help to parents both in providing a listening, non-judgemental ear and offering expert advice.  Their staff and volunteers are happy to talk about wee and poo all day and have helped countless desperate families over the years.

But it is not only because of the excellent work that they do that I love ERIC so much.  They are also great in looking after their supporters.  They do not bombard you with requests for donations, but treat you with the human touch.  I have had several personal emails, and even handwritten letters, from various members of staff.  They keep you updated on the work they are doing and really make you feel valued.

The only sad thing is that ERIC was not around when I was a child.  I’m sure with their help I would have been able to overcome my soiling problem quicker, and they would also have been a great source of comfort and help to my mother.  Although she often got cross with me when I had accidents, my mother is a wonderful person, always helping others and devoted to her family.  My soiling undoubtedly caused her anguish and, like me, she probably thought that no other school aged child still had accidents in his pants like I did.  There was no internet to turn to for information and, like so many parents, she felt unable to discuss my poo problems with others.  Being able to speak to an organisation like ERIC would, I’m sure, have brought a great sense of relief to her.

Advice on toilet training is another
of ERIC's specialities (c)

ERIC can also help with potty training, and their online shop sells bedwetting alarms, travel potties, vibrating watches and even pee and poo soft toys and keyrings.  They also sell a wide range of protective pants and swimwear suitable for containing poo accidents.  And finally, they have a wide range of books covering all aspects of children’s toileting, including my own books for older children who soil, A Boy Like You and A Girl LikeYou, which will be the subject of a future post.

For more information please go to ERIC’s website, www.eric.org.uk, or click on the box on this website.

ERIC, 36 Old School House, Britannia Road, Kingswood, Bristol, BS15 8DB, United Kingdom.  ERIC is a Registered Charity (no 1002424) and a Company Limited by Guarantee (no 2580579) registered in England and Wales.

HELP!!!! MY CHILD HAS ENCOPRESIS

In July 2012 fellow former encopresis sufferer DimityTelfer suggested I join a Facebook group of which she herself was a member.  The group was called HELP!!!!My Child Has Encopresis, and was set up to provide a forum for parents whose children, of all ages, had soiling problems.  Although I was not a parent, Dimity felt that my input would be useful as an ‘adult survivor’, and that many members would be interested in hearing about my childhood experiences.

The group provides a vital forum for parents
 of children and teenagers who soil (c).

I agreed to join and quickly received a warm welcome from many group members, who were keen to hear my story and try to see encopresis from a child’s point of view and understand how their own children may be feeling.  The fact that I was male was also seen as an advantage as more boys suffer from encopresis than girls (in the group there is an approximate 60/40 split between boys and girls who soil).  As it is mostly mothers who do the lion’s share of the work in trying to help their child with their toilet problems, some found it particularly useful to read about the experiences of a child of the opposite sex to themselves.

I quickly discovered just what an amazing group it was, offering advice and support in a totally non-judgemental atmosphere, with members sharing their experiences on what worked for their child and what didn’t.  One of the best things about the group was that it offered an environment where parents could freely discuss their child’s toilet issues, which they often felt unable to talk about with their family and friends.  Sadly, soiling in children past potty training age remains largely a taboo subject in the real world, and the older the child the harder it is to talk about to others who have had no experience of toilet problems in their offspring.  This makes encopresis a very isolating condition, both for the child and his or her parents.

Many members find comfort just from being among others who are going through similar experiences, while others are delighted to be able to talk about their child’s soiling with others who ‘get it’.  It is also a good place to vent frustrations on bad days when, for example their son has refused point blank to try to use the toilet and has soiled himself five times during the day or their daughter has pooed her pants in a public place and refused to change herself.  The flip side of this is that parents are also able to celebrate their child’s toilet successes, big and small.  Few people outside the group would understand a mother getting excited because her 8 year old daughter has kept her knickers clean all day or her teenage son has taken himself off to the bathroom and done a poo!

I had never thought that anyone would want to know the explicit details of how I had pooed myself as a child, but I was asked various questions about my juvenile toileting habits that I was happy to answer as candidly as I could.  One of the rules of the group is that nothing is TMI.  It is a principle I have adopted when writing this blog.  Some people may be shocked to read a blog in which soiling is discussed so frankly, and using words like ‘poo’ instead of euphemisms like ‘Number 2’, but I have found this approach to be one which parents of children who soil appreciate and find usefu

The 'sister' groups offer a friendly and supportive
 environment for the parents of children and teenagers
 with daytime and/or nighttime wetting problems. (c)

In July 2016, four years after joining, I was invited to become an Administrator of the group and I was happy to agree.  Being such a friendly group means that disputes rarely arise, but when they do members are quick to alert me so that they can be dealt with promptly.  A month later I decided to set up a ‘sister’ group for parents of children and teenagers who wet themselves during the day, another taboo subject.  Daytime Wetting in Children and Teens operates on similar principles to the Encopresis group. 

The latest addition to this 'family' of groups is Bedwetting in Children and Teens, which I set up in 2018 to cover the sadly common problem of nighttime wetting which causes much heartache to young people and their parents and carers.  In the case of all three groups, I am acting in my capacity of Administrator to try to ensure they offer a friendly, welcoming and non-judgemental environment.

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.