ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the primary elimination disorders that afflict children in school, enuresis and encopresis. Although the descriptor school aged has traditionally referred to children age 6 years and older, there has been an inexorably increasing emphasis on academic training in preschool coupled with increasing enrollment over the past few decades. Thus, it seems appropriate to include problems relevant to preschoolers in a chapter for a book on pediatric psychology in school settings. Correspondingly, the chapter also discusses toileting refusal, a category of problems sometimes exhibited by children between the ages of 3 and 5 years. Although the defining clinical features of these disorders are biological, the optimal conceptual orientation is biobehavioral (Friman & Jones, 1998; Houts, 1991; Levine, 1982; Mellon & Houts, 1995; Mellon & McGrath, 2000). The reader should note that page limitations for chapters in this book necessarily limit coverage. There are vast literatures on enuresis and encopresis and we are not able to equitably credit the many able investigators who have worked on these problems. In lieu of that,we refer readers to comprehensive reviewsof the literature that exhaustively cite primary sources and that we cite liberally throughout this chapter (especially Christophersen & Purvis, 2001; Friman & Jones, 1998; Houts, 1991; McGrath, Mellon, & Murphy, 2000; Mellon & Houts, 1995; Mellon & McGrath, 2000).
