Before You Potty Train Your Child
I have felt so much pressure to potty train my daughter. I will be honest. There is a big part of me that has wondered why it’s so important to potty train early. Diapers, in my opinion, are much easier than having to stop everything to take your child to the bathroom and potty training is just one more factor, thrown in there with nap time and meal time, in strategically planning your outings. We’re busy, and in my free time with my daughter, teaching her shapes, colors, and how to count seem much more important than learning to pee-pee in the potty. While I would rather work on other developmental goals, I do know that it is important (and cheaper) for Darah to be potty trained. Potty training brings about more independence for her.
Recently, at the start of 2008, I determined that 2008 was the year Darah was going to be potty trained. I have read “Potty Train Your Child in Just One Day,” and gone to countless sites about potty training. I have taken the “Is your child ready?” quizzes and determined that she is. I have tried a few days of having her run around without bottoms for a day and taken her every 10 minutes to the potty. I have made the sticker chart, decorated the bathroom, charted her elimination pattern (when she pees and poops) and I have incorporated potty time in her schedule at school with her teachers. I’ve come to the place though where I am now slowing down!
So, like in all mountains I have climbed, I have decided to focus on one step at a time. We are at the place where we are “pre-potty training” Darah. By pre-potty training, I mean that I am training her to go through the whole routine of potty time, without the actual elimination in the toilet.
Preparing your child for potty training:
- Desensitize your child to the bathroom. The bathroom is unlike most rooms in the house, so allow your child in there with you frequently.
- Whenever you go, take your child. Celebrate when YOU go to the bathroom and allow your child to join in that celebration.
- Empty your child’s poopy diaper in the toilet. Explain to your child that his or her poo poo belongs in the toilet and flush it together.
- Change all diapers in the bathroom.
- Teach your child what the potty time routine looks like, including: lifting up the toilet lid cover, pulling down your pants, sitting on the toilet for a while, wiping, flushing, pulling back up your pants, washing your hands, and closing the bathroom door when you’re finished. If your child can follow this whole routine, once you start the elimination training, half the battle is already won!
- Teach the concept of “wet and dry” to your child. When their diaper is wet, let them touch it and explain that it’s wet (washing their hands right after, of course.) When their diaper is dry, let them feel the dryness and explain to them that they are dry.
- Don’t force your child to explore the bathroom. You do not want your child to become aversive to the bathroom, or the toilet.
- Always have a good attitude about potty training. Just like all developmental milestones, potty training is a process that will not be without accidents. When a child is learning to walk, parents don’t scold him when he falls down, they encourage him to get back up and try again. Your child will pick up on your frustration with potty training and will decide not to cooperate, and that my friend will be a very tough battle!
With the huge help of Darah’s teachers at school, Darah has learned the potty time routine. She independently pulls down her pants, sits on the toilet, wipes, flushes, and washes her hands. She has not begun eliminating in the toilet yet, except for a few random times we’ve caught her! However, I feel that every day we go through the potty routine with her, we are getting closer and closer to once and for all toss the diapers, put on the Little Mermaid big girl panties, and go for it!
What’s next?
My plan right now is to continue having “potty time” several times a day, and hopefully we will “catch” her when she needs to go more frequently and celebrate those moments. I think that with Darah, we are going to probably need to schedule train her after next. By schedule training, I mean that we figure out the times that she needs to potty during the day and we take her to the bathroom to do her thing. Shortly after she is schedule trained, I am hopeful she will then spontaneously start asking to use the toilet at appropriate times. I will then write a post here on The Mom Crowd and give you all my insider info on the next steps!
Dr Phil’s Potty Training Method
Potty training a child with special needs
What is your experience with potty training? Did/Do you feel the same pressure I’ve felt about potty training? Do you think early or late potty training is better? Any good info, books, or sites to share? Let’s talk POTTY!! 
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There was so much pressure with Nate. I remember my MIL wanted me to potty train him starting at 11 months. pppsssshhh, yeah right! I introduced him to potty training when he was 18 months old only to find out that he was not cognitively ready. With him crying, couldn’t sit still, and afraid, peeing on the carpet a few times and screaming about it I stopped all together.
Then after our move to another city, in and out of Grandma’s and finally into our built home Nate potty trained right away. Because HE was ready! He expressed his excitement about being a big boy, he was happy, steady, and even patient! He even wanted to wear buzz light year underwear. I was surprised at the difference between my 2 attempts with him. Each time he had to go we rewarded him with much praise and he got to pick out 4 m&m’s from the candy jar. Yes we bribed him! But it went so well and we all enjoyed it! Now I’m waiting for Lana to show that’s she ready, but until then we have to enjoy the diaper days.
Thanks again for a great topic posted!
Abby started showing interest at 18 months and even went on her own a couple times, but then she reverted back. For the next year and a half, we tried potty training on and off, using various methods, and sometimes it went really well, other times it was really frustrating. She’d seem to get it, and then she’d totally revert. She was really looking forward to the reward of big girl princess panties once she finally got it down, but she kept having accidents, etc. Finally, I gave her her princess panties, even though she hadn’t fully become potty trained just to see what would happen, and from then on (even though there are still accidents on rare occasions) she did NOT want to get those pretty panties wet (and CERTAINLY not dirty!). That seemed to do the trick for her!
With Abby, I think she was ready fairly early, but the potty is the one area where kids have total control. I think Abby knew that and she wanted to do things on her terms, and when she was ready, she did it!
My grandma offered me a little perspective and relief from all the pressure. She reminded me that my kids will not always be in diapers. At some point, they WILL choose to use the potty. I will not have a 17 year old in diapers. They’ll do it when they’re ready.
Breanna, that is so funny that your grandma said that (funny, but true)! It’s nice to have some perspective on the whole potty-training thing. I had a similar experience with my son, and one of my best friends made a comment not unlike the one your grandmother made. He also started going on the toilet at about 18 months, but he wasn’t FULLY trained (night-time, everything) until a little after the age of three. It’s all good now; he’ll even get up in the middle of the night and go on his own if he needs to!
I felt a lot of pressure while we were living in the Arab world to toilet train as soon as possible b/c that’s what everyone else did (and there, I think it was more economical b/c diapers are so expensive). Now that I’ve been through the whole ordeal, I know that with my 2nd child I’ll probably be a little more lax.
Don’t ya’ll think there’s some competitive force that overcomes us Moms in the area of potty training (and so many other areas for that matter?)
McKenna, that’s an interesting topic, maybe something worth writing a full post on (?)
My daughter has Down Syndrome and showed signs she was ready to potty train early. Then she lost interest, yet we continued to take her and get her ready. Lots of praise, positive reinforcement works wonders. But we didn’t get real serious about it until just after her 3rd birthday, when she decided she could change her own pull ups when she was wet. I mean, if she knew she was wet and didn’t like it enough to change the pull-up, it was definitely time to do it right. There were occasional accidents and she wasn’t completely outta pull-ups until she was 4. But we progressed steadily. And to tell ya the truth, my typically developing son, was much harder to potty train than my special needs daughter was.
My experience with Caleb was very similar to Breanna’s except Caleb first began showing interest at 2 years. I gave him a treat as a reward and it worked for an entire week and then he lost interest. I then began trying different methods because I figured if Caleb did it for a week, I could easily gain his interest again and have him trained in no time. I was wrong! Everything I had researched all pointed to the child needing to be ready, but for nearly a year I was pulling my hair out.
Right before his 3rd birthday last March, he began showing sincere interest and this time I allowed Caleb to take the rein. I stopped using Pull-ups since he treated them like diapers, and had him pick out his own underwear. He was potty-trained within a week! He had a few accidents in the beginning, and he’s been fully trained (wears underwear to bed) for several months now. He’s only had 1 accident while sleeping. Had I backed off and not pressured myself and Caleb, and really waited until he was fully ready, I would have saved myself tons of battles.
My mother and MIL were the only 2 people who gave me grief about Caleb not being trained by the age of 2. Once I had a talk with them, they both completely backed off and said nothing more. I just didn’t care what people thought because they weren’t the ones having to deal with it….I was!
Darah’s a smart girl….she’ll get it soon!
[...] honor of McKenna’s potty training post [...]
We have used the potty training in a day with the two older boys. Isaac, our 2nd, is too distracted (and lazy?) to stop what he is doing all the time to go pee in the potty. We still remind him during the day and sometimes he will initiate on his own. He has only pooped in the potty a handful of times. He is in underwear during the day but still in diapers at bed and nap time. His bowels are so regular that he will often poop in his diaper first thing in the morning before getting out of bed. I am beginning to think that he purposely waits to poop in his diaper because it is easy to do that rather than get up and poop on the potty which he doesn’t like to do that much. He loves the praise he gets for going but it isn’t a motivator to him.
He is 3 and I asked our pediatrician about it and he said to continue to do a “tender love” system by offering lots of rewards when he does go on his own with no initiative on our parts. When Spring comes he said we should go the “tough love” route and do something like this: “Everyone is getting dessert tonight but you can’t have any because only people who go poop and pee in the potty all the time get dessert.” I am hoping that the reward system will click completely over the next few months and we won’t have to go that route.