NOV 20 — One in every eight children in Hong Kong is constipated. This is not a pretty topic served up as dinner conversation but recent findings have shown that the problem is causing a stink among our little ones.
Researchers at the Chinese University believe that one of the reasons is because children put off using the toilet due to embarrassment or by spending too much time on other pursuits (The Standard, Oct 21, “Don’t delay on toilet trouble, children told” ).
Staying apart from their parents, spending more than two hours a day on homework (15 per cent) and sleeping less than seven hours a day (17 per cent) also appear to contribute to constipation.
Of the 2,318 primary school students interviewed between March and June, 12.2 per cent suffered from constipation. Of the 200 students who did not live with their parents, 28.8 per cent experienced this condition.
Doctors say that therapy, treatment and alterations to the diet will help them recover. Serious constipation will take up to a year to treat.
I was surprised by the high numbers. I mean, if you, like me had attended schools with absolutely filthy toilets, then it would make sense to delay using the toilet until you got home.
I remember holding my breath every time I had to walk past the toilet, which was on the way to the school canteen. The floor was perpetually wet and at least one of the eight squatting stalls would be clogged. Poorly aimed stools and urine were a daily affair. This was at an urban primary school in Petaling Jaya.
Granted we were young then but the situation did not improve when we reached secondary school. Only this time the school tasked students to clean our own toilets. That’s right. Each classroom was assigned a stall and every day two girls were assigned to scrub it with soap powder, a toilet brush and *shudder* use the short hose that was attached to the tap inside the stall (same one that some used to wash themselves) to rinse the soap away.
You can understand why some of us chose not to use the toilet unless we had no choice. And in order not to have to use the toilet, we drank less. It is a vicious cycle. I hope you are not reading this over a meal.
The thing is, Hong Kong toilets are surprisingly clean. Even public toilets. I was relieved when I visited my son’s kindergarten and saw how well maintained it was. So avoiding a dirty loo at school should not be an issue.
The research findings also mentioned that children who have only three or four meals with their parents a week tend to suffer from constipation (16 per cent). I take this to mean that perhaps there is not a balanced diet being provided or not having a parent hover over them to ensure they eat their fruit and vegetables.
It is common for working parents to return home after 8pm, long after children have had their dinner. In an interview with The Standard, researchers were quoted saying that parents play an important role in helping prevent constipation from becoming an embarrassing issue for their children. I for one took for granted how much work goes into making, um, regular deposits.
We have had our own poo issue as well, though not yet related to the factors above. Up until recently, our son enjoyed regular visits to the loo.
Then along came nursery school and for reasons that still befuddle me, constipation struck. We went from twice-a-day motions to once in five days. He ate his fruit, yoghurt and drank fluids but something else was happening — he was holding it in!
There was the typical warning signs: staining on the underpants (up to five pairs daily), bloating, lack of appetite and straining. By day five we were forced to resort to an enema, which is awfully traumatic on a three-year-old and his parents.
We took steps to inform his school teachers of our problem and the measures we were taking at home. We asked they provided encouragement when he needed to go and exercise patience if he had an accident. They were wonderfully supportive.
Then finally, after weeks of tears, we found our solution: a reward chart. I printed a free chart off the Internet with pictures of a little boy sitting on his potty and the words “I pooped!” underneath. Each successful attempt meant colouring in one star on the chart. It was a surprisingly simple strategy.
After five coloured stars, Ishan got to pick out a toy from the shop. He made sure he collected big on his first successful attempt, picking out a big truck that cost three times what we would normally spend on a toy. But a promise was a promise and it was worth it.
It has been three months since and we have now got his act down to a once-in-two days affair. We never thought that poo, or rather the absence of it, could cause so many problems. Knowing exercise contributes to healthy bowel movements, we religiously keep to Ishan’s playtime with his friends in the evenings.
The exercise plus all that gulping of water (it helps to watch his friends drink from their bottles) works wonders. We’re definitely not scheduling any after school activities for a while. Meanwhile, I still can’t get Armand Van Helden’s “The Funk Phenomena” (1994) out of my head every time we hit a dry, hard spell.
* The views expressed here are the personal opinion of the columnist.
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