How Irregular Bowel Movement Can Put A Damp On Your Potty Training Efforts

How Irregular Bowel Movement Can Put A Damp On Your Potty Training Efforts


Children with wetting problems may have difficulties with bowel eliminations as irregular or infrequent bowel movements or constipation.


Studies have found that children who had both constipation and night wetting, when treated for constipation ultimately improved dryness. Commonly The correction of a fecal impaction (a hard, dry plug of stool in the rectum that is removed with an enema or by manual means) would then improve the child's ability to stay dry, or the child would stay dry using previously unsuccessful treatments. Based on this discoveries doctors began trying to change the bowel habits of children with less severe bowel problems, to see if that would help them achieve dryness.


They found that, in response to our initial question about bowel habits, some families of children who failed to attain dryness had not noted any bowel difficulties in their children, but in fact many of those children were experiencing bowel irregularity. After the irregularity was corrected, their potty training programs became more effective. While recognizing that few children are as regular as clockwork and that is not easy to tell exactly what children do when they go to the bathroom and close the door, but never the less it is vital to keep track of your child's bowel habits. The accuracy of parents answers to these questions may be the missing link to your child's potty training success.


Naturally, youth, preteens, and teens tend to be private about their bowel movements. Of corse you should respect your child's desire for privacy, but you should also explain to him why this information is important. It may also help to remind your child that achieving the ultimate goal, dryness, require taking responsibilities and participating in a remedy. To give up a little privacy for a few weeks in order to achieve potty perfection for a lifetime is a small price to pay.


We prefer the term regular than normal bowel movement, because what is normal variates from one individual to the next. For some people, normal movements maybe once a day in the mourning. For others, a normal movement can be once every two days, and most often in the evening. On the other hand, having a regular bowel movement implies that the child is eliminating his solid waist daily, and at a regular time interval, and that the movements are comfortable for him and not causing pain. Even if do not believe that your child has bowel troubles, the issue needs to be consider when trying to solve his wetting problems.


They are two reasonable explanation for the influence of bowel disorders in wetting problems:


The Numbed Bladder

As an example, let's say a child has just fallen from her bicycle and scraped her arm. After her mom cleans the scrape on her forearm, she give it a kiss and then rubs it gently to make it feel better. When she rubs the wound, the mother is actually stimulating inhibitory nerves, which in turn inhibit the transmissions of the nerves that convey pain. So once the rubbing starts, the child's arm feels less painful.


Similar when a chronically full rectum "rubs" up against the bladder wall, which is in front of it, eventually the rubbing numbs a child's sense of bladder fullness. This decreased sensitivity happens by day (causing dampness) or by night (making nighttime dryness difficult).


The Spastic Bladder

As the bladder fills with urine, it usually expands smoothly and uniformly. If the rectum is full, however, then the bladder's expansion may be restricted, causing the bladder to respond with an automatic contraction, even though it could still hold more urine. In other words, the spastic bladder, as doctors call it, contracts in spasms, rather than smoothly with good control, and result in wetting.