3 year old keeps pooping in his pants at the same time everyday.

I’m an ECE teacher and looking for advice.

This child is completely potty trained at home, in every environment, and even mostly at school. With one exception. At 10am, after we’re outside and have had morning snack, and it’s free play on the playground and yard, he will poop in his undies. It’s literally everyday and at the same time everyday.

Obviously we’ve tried proactively taking him to the toilet at this time and having him sit. He (mostly) willingly goes, will sit down and try, say nothings coming out, and go back outside. We’ve sat for upwards of ten minutes, but that’s pretty much the limit on the amount of time we can spend trying. We don’t have extra staff who can sit with him and wait for him to go, and he also starts to protest after a while, and we can’t force him to sit.

He’s a very smart kid and has great language skills for his age. We get down at eye level with him and ask why he keeps having accidents and won’t go poop in the potty. He say things like he promises he’ll do it tomorrow, or that his mommy and daddy will be proud if he goes poop in the potty at school and he’ll do it next time. He also has no issue with peeing in the potty, or checking potty periodically throughout the day. We also try not to make it a big deal when he has accidents or make him feel bad, but we’re getting to our wits end.

The parents aren’t much help. We tell them about the accidents and they just tell us “well, he’s perfectly potty trained at home or anywhere else we go.” These last two weeks we’ve just started preemptively putting him in a pull-up before we go outside in the morning, for our own sanity, and the same thing happens and he just poops in the pull-up.

My theory is that he doesn’t want to stop playing to go poop. It always happens right around 10am when he’s playing outside, and he’s ALWAYS playing. He’s got a lot of friends, and they’re always running around, playing some kind of game. I never see him playing by himself or taking any breaks.

Has anyone ever dealt with this? Any suggestions or things we can try? At this point we’re just hoping one day he decides to poop in the toilet, but who knows when that could be.