4-year-old girl suffers severe constipation after school's 'no toilet paper in cubicle' policy left her scared to use the loo
A mother has claimed that her daughter, 4, had to be hospitalized with severe constipation as her school's policy on toilet paper left her too scared to use the loo.
Fahmin Khanum revealed that the four-year-old girl suffered from so much anxiety that she could not use the restroom. She has slammed the Kitchener Road Primary school located in Cardiff which does not keep toilet rolls in the students' cubicles. The children who are between the ages of 4-11 are required to take the toilet paper from a single dispenser before using the loo.
As reported by Wales Online, the children need to go out again if they need more. This means that a few children have soiled themselves while others are too anxious to relieve themselves, Khanum shared. She added that her daughter had to be admitted to the University Hospital of Wales last month after suffering from agonizing pains.
Medics eventually diagnosed it as constipation, something that the child had never suffered from prior to the incident.
"She was not clearing her bowels properly in school because of the toilet paper policy. It was a traumatic experience. My daughter was quite independent and she was potty trained at two-and-a-half years old, and had not had problems before".
It was only when Khanum visited the school that she found out the root of her child's problem. The four-year-old was so worried about taking the right amount of paper that she was not relieving herself when she needed to while at the school. "At parents’ evening, I went to the toilet and there was a single tissue dispenser and my daughter counted out five sheets and went to the toilet. There are no tissue dispensers in the cubicles".
"I spoke to the headteacher and she told me it was so that children don’t block the toilets using too much toilet paper. My daughter was not clearing her bowels properly in school because of the toilet paper policy. This caused her to end up in hospital 100%," Khanum added.
"You can imagine you run out of toilet paper and you know you might need to take your pants down and go to the public area and go back in, or pull your pants back up and soil yourself going out to get more paper. This is what happened to my daughter and she then had to go and tell a teacher in front of other children that she had soiled herself. This is not just about my daughter, it’s about all the children. It’s a health and safety issue impacting on children’s welfare and it’s awful for the children’s dignity," she added.