What Poop Should Look Like

By Suzanne

So back in the 1990s, as Dr. Hodges mentions in our book, some folks in England actually stopped listening to good music and eating bad food long enough to produce a pictorial representation of the various forms of poop.

It’s called the Bristol Stool Scale — it was developed at the University of Bristol — and it  has its own Facebook page. You can even buy dishwasher-safe Bristol Stool Scale mugs.

If your kid’s poops look like Types 1 or 2 on the scale, you can bet she has a mass o’ poop in her rectum, no matter how often she poops. Type 4 is a stellar stool. A+!

Anyway, as helpful as the Bristol scale may be, it’s a bit complex for preschoolers. My 4-½-year-olds developed their own poop scale, assigning names rather than numbers, to their poops. They explain it all in the video.

One clarification: As the boys indicate in the video, “thick snake” = bad. But poop shaped like a thin snake is fine.