My 3.5 year old has been potty trained since May. She's always resisted pooping in the potty, so we just let her be and would give her a diaper for poop. In September, we had a month long stretch where she started pooping in the potty so we figured we were done, and then she had a small surgery and regressed back to diapers. We let it go, figuring it'll just click as it did before that.

The complicating factor is that she has been a poop holder for a while, even before she potty trained. She holds for days, and then goes, straining pretty hard. She doesn't have accidents or poops in her underwear or anything, and goes 3-4 days without a BM. We've talked to her doc, we do all the right things with her diet and water intake and fiber supplements. She isn't constipated - the BMs are normal when she does have them - it's some kind of psychological thing and she won't tell us why she won't go. I don't think it's pain related, but we have done regular regimens of stool softeners and are thinking of going back to doing one again.

The tricky thing is - she never poops at school, and they are required to be potty trained at this point, so it hasn't been an issue thus far because she goes potty just fine otherwise. If we start with the stool softeners again, she might end up having accidents because she won't use the potty to poop. I don't think it'll be an issue to put her in a diaper, but I definitely want to talk to her teachers about this to figure out how to potentially fix both issues at the same time. I don't want to put the burden on her teachers, especially since the other kids do all this just fine, but she's there all day so I'm not sure how to approach it otherwise. If anyone has delt with this double whammy, I'd love your advice.