Earlier this summer, I witnessed what I perceived as a miracle. My daughter, who I had been attempting to potty train for seven months to no avail, started using the bathroom 100% of the time within three days. In this post, I’m going to share what I learned in the hopes that it will be beneficial for other caregivers.
In early May, I wrote a post about my challenges with potty training. Long story short, my daughter was fully potty trained two months before her second birthday. This happened at a time when we embarked on buying our first home. It took a lot of time to search for and buy a home. She began to have accidents and eventually I put her back into a diaper because the appointments and research and paperwork and meetings and travel, not to mention renovation, took up a lot of our time. It was six months later, in December 2014, before we had some breathing room.
I was ready to return to potty training thinking she would pick it up quite easily. Quite the opposite, Polina would have nothing to do with the toilet. She kicked and screamed, arched her back, did everything in her power not to use the potty. Fortunately, for all of us, all of her number twos went into the toilet, but she peed through her underwear no matter how many times a day I changed it or talked to her about it. She demanded to wear a diaper. I didn’t understand it. Why was a girl willing to use the potty in June be so averse to the potty 6 months later? I was racking my brain trying to understand her. Nothing seemed to work. Potty training round 2 went on for seven months.
Separately from all of this, I decided to try out a parent-tot playgroup and happened to mention my dilemma to one of the teachers there. To my surprise, she sent me the following three videos and offered me a 30 minute consultation. To my greater surprise, it worked. Here is what helped me:
1. Figure out whether your child is ready. Tempered with your desire to potty train is your child’s ability (which is separate from willingness) to potty train. Figure out whether your child is able and willing, able but unwilling, unable but willing, or unable and unwilling. If a child is not able, which could be because they are too young, haven’t physically matured to hold their bowels, or have a disability, then it can be punitive to force them to do something they will mostly likely not succeed in.
I knew my daughter was able. She was fully potty trained for about a month before things went awry. She would also immediately run up and tell us she made “messes” when she peed herself. When I showed her the toilet, she would have nothing to do with it, but when I asked her “where does pee go?” she would point and say “in the potty.” I also asked her, “Does pee go on the floor?” to which she replied a long “noo.” Cognitively she knew where pee went, she just didn’t want to use the toilet. Our habitual question and answer after every mess was turning into a game that only one of us found amusing.
Get a second opinion if need be, but invest time in determining whether your child is able to use the potty (or anything else you are trying to get your child to do).
2. You must be committed to potty training. This concept seems simple enough but there is a deeper layer to it. I thought my frustration and anxiety levels were symptoms of my commitment to potty training. I was wrong. Commitment means not caving in, as I had done, when my daughter was having a tantrum on the floor. It means being consistent and supporting her through the storm that is the tantrum. If you’re squeamish, like I am, about hearing your child cry, you have to decide whether you want to walk through that tribulation or not. Once you have determined that your child is able to use the potty, the question, as these next videos show, is not so much is your child ready for potty training but are you ready?
Polina had one tantrum once I implemented these suggestions. I held my ground, and it was hard. Previously I felt helpless sitting on the floor watching her have a tantrum so I would pick her up and take her away from the bathroom to make it stop. After watching these videos, I kept my mind focused on the task at hand. I didn’t fall into helplessness, but into resoluteness. It didn’t take long for her to stop crying and we tried to use the potty again. This time she went.
3. Take away the child toilet seat. When the consultant advised me to do this, I was skeptical. I didn’t think my daughter would like the feeling of her feet not touching the ground when she used the potty. Or at least that’s how I would feel. That’s why I bought her her own seat. But the consultant said having another toilet provides a choice which can be stressful to a child. If you live in a large house, too many bathrooms may be another stressor. She suggested keeping it as simple as possible.
At this point, I was willing to try anything. So I removed Polina’s potty from the bathroom.
4. Ask who will go first. This by far was the tip that changed the dynamics between me and my daughter. The consultant advised me to begin with scheduled potty times, about every hour or so. She advised me to walk into the bathroom with my daughter, carrying her if needed, say it was time to go potty and ask who will go first? If your child doesn’t want to go, tell them you will go first and lead by example.
I was surprised that this girl, who had arched her back at the sight of a bathroom, volunteered to go first the very first time I asked her. These words changed the dynamic between me and my daughter from one of confrontation to one of collaboration. There was only one time when it didn’t work and Polina had a tantrum. But aside from that it worked incredibly well.
5. Say goodbye to the diaper and introduce training pants. I must admit I hadn’t even considered training pants. I had heard and read that they were the worst thing for potty training because they essentially allowed a child to continue to pee in their pants. But again, I had tried everything I knew and was willing to give this a shot.
I was pleasantly pleased with the training pant. (I bought the most “natural” kind I could find in the store.) The feel of training pants is akin to putting on underwear, and there is something psychological about not being passive and having someone change you, but pulling on an “underpant” yourself. I could tell by Polina’s behavior, expression, and words that she recognized a change was happening.
I talked to my daughter about saying goodbye to diapers and introduced the training pant, which I called the “underpant.” (Polina has a book about animals in underpants, which she likes very much, so I thought it would be a good word to use to imitate some of her favorite animals.) Polina liked repeating the word “underpant,” which I thought was a good sign. She let me put it on. I told her she couldn’t pee in her underpant the way she could in a diaper. I reiterated that she needed to tell me when she needed to go.
These tips worked for me better than I could have predicted. Polina had one tantrum in three days. It was a dramatic turnaround, considering she was having a tantrum several times a day if we even stepped inside a bathroom . Within three days of me implementing the above, she was fully potty trained. She even napped in her underwear. Within a week, she was waking up dry in the mornings too most of the time. We reused her dry training pants until I realized, why not try underwear? And she has been in underwear full time ever since. There were two accidents this entire summer while she was sleeping. Earlier this summer, she woke me up telling me she had to go to the bathroom. She rarely does these days and often goes to the bathroom by herself.
Polina has no qualms using the bathroom, although that doesn’t mean she doesn’t have her preferences in other areas. She still has her way with things I find annoying. For me it’s a matter of give and take and picking your battles. I knew potty training for me was a battle worth fighting for. Conversely, I know a woman who hasn’t introduced the potty to her one-month-shy-of-three-year-old. She’s waiting for him to be interested. We are shaped by our own upbringing and our relationship with our child. The choice I made isn’t necessarily the choice you should make.
Was it these methods alone, or the culmination of my efforts over the past seven months, or the memory of using the toilet that caught up with my daughter and made potty training successful this time around? It’s hard for me to say. All I can say is that these tips helped me and they came at time when I was personally out of ideas and methods. If you’re struggling with potty training, don’t be afraid to ask for help. If I hadn’t mentioned my dilemma (because it was at the forefront of my mind most days), I wouldn’t have gotten this advice that worked for us.
Best wishes to you on your journey.
