A potty training question

Snapdragon750 · May 2014

Hey everyone, I tried to post about this to the potty training forum but I don't think I've ever seen a deader forum in my life. Anyway, after sort of passively trying to get my daughter (who will be three in a month and a half) interested in the potty for the past 9 months or so after I brought one into the house, I finally took a stand and started potty training yesterday. She's definitely ready, but doesn't mind sitting in a wet or dirty diaper and has zero motivation to go--she is also in a phase in which she doesn't like to do something if she knows I really want her to. I have a feeling that if I just put her in training pants or underwear she would train very quickly because she absolutely hates being wet or dirty in general, but I just felt like that was a mean thing to do until I was SURE she could go on her own.

So, today I put her in pull-ups and have been having her sit on the potty every 20 minutes, offering small prizes if she goes in the potty and a tiny prize just for trying. It's been a fight to get her there sometimes, but once she knows I mean it she will sit for 5-10 minutes...but won't go...and then consistently pees in her diaper in the 20 minutes between potty breaks!! Even after she woke from 12 hours' sleep with a dry diaper she wouldn't go on the potty (and in fact cried the whole time she was on it), but went immediately in her diaper once I let her get up. A couple of times her diaper was warm with pee when we got to the potty, so she'd JUST gone.

So, this makes me believe that she does have good control, and that she's purposely holding it on the potty and going in her diaper because that's what she's comfortable with, and I'm thinking I should just switch her to training pants or just underwear. Does that sound right? I'm very hesitant to do this...first kid and all!!

bumpuser9524622 · May 2014

Is there a reason that you need to potty train right now? DD is almost 3 and it's still a work in progress for us. I talked to her pedi about it and she said to let her do it on her own terms since she's stubborn and would probably protest if I tried to "make" her do it (which it sounds like your daughter is doing). I leave it up to DD if she wants to use the potty or not. And we have both a potty chair and potty seat, so she can choose between those and feel like she has more control over the situation. Good luck, I know it's frustrating sometimes!

sugarbear0524 · May 2014

I would just put her in underwear except while she's asleep. Wearing a diaper or pull-ups just gives her permission to go in her pants. Plan to do a lot of laundry and scrubbing out little underwear. It isn't fun but it will get you there faster. That's what I'm doing with my son. He's doing great with pee, not so much with poop. He turns 3 this month.

Snapdragon750 · May 2014

sunnydaysarehere said:

Is there a reason that you need to potty train right now? DD is almost 3 and it's still a work in progress for us. I talked to her pedi about it and she said to let her do it on her own terms since she's stubborn and would probably protest if I tried to "make" her do it (which it sounds like your daughter is doing). I leave it up to DD if she wants to use the potty or not. And we have both a potty chair and potty seat, so she can choose between those and feel like she has more control over the situation. Good luck, I know it's frustrating sometimes!

I was also going to just let her stay in diapers until she was ready, but her dirty diapers are becoming a problem. She won't tell me when she poops; she'll instead hide, and if I don't notice it right away it's a huge mess. Even if I figure it out before she gets a rash, she'll scream and cry and fight when I change her diaper because she doesn't like me to clean "inside." I have to hold her down with one arm and wipe fast with the other, and if she's got a rash it's just physically impossible to clean her without a second person literally holding her down while she screams hysterically. The whole thing is awful and traumatizing and I want it over with. But it's either that or a bath...which I don't always have time for and which she also fights!! She also hates being changed on changing tables now because she's tall and doesn't fit them, but in public there's no other option. I'm not a germophobe but I draw the line at public restroom floors.

DawnLilly · May 2014

Okay my method is a bit cruel but I have heard it works really well. Does she have a girl cousin/friend that is about 4-6 years old? If she does set up a plan date and have the other mom and child know what is up. Every time the cousin has to go encourage your DVD to go watch. Basically, big girls use the potty; babies where diapers. If the other child can express this sentiment even better.

This works exceptionally well with children who have physical control but need a change of mindset. Then, when she does start to go on the potty let her call the mom and other girl so she feels accomplishment and recognition.

chardonnay24 · May 2014

We struggled with potty training for the past year. We started about this time last year, so he was about 27 months. He had all the readiness signs, so I thought for sure that it'd be easy. For awhile, it was fine, although I was the one trained to put him on the toilet every hour or so. He is pretty strong willed and when it became clear to him that potty training was something that *I* wanted him to do, he started resisting. I decided to back off. We tried a couple more times over the last year, but I never really pushed it.

Finally, about a month ago, when he started waking up from naps and overnight dry, I decided that we would try again. We didn't use pull ups because he treats them like diapers, and we didn't use diapers because when I'd put a diaper on him, he'd just use the diaper. I told him that he was a big boy now and that we are done using diapers. I told him that it was his responsibility to get himself to and from the bathroom and use it when he needed to. I told him to ask me for help if he needed it, but that if he peed in his underwear, he'd need to clean it up and help me wash his pants. I basically tried to make it seem like I didn't care one way or the other if he didn't use the toilet.

It worked! He's had a couple accidents until he got the hang of recognizing that he needed to go and telling me, but in less than a month, we went from diapers 24/7 to underwear all the time, including naps and nights now that he's been consistently dry for the past couple weeks. He tells me (or just does it) 100% of the time now. It was really very easy, but of course I had no idea if it would work or if he'd just pee all over the house.

Snapdragon750 · May 2014

DawnLilly said:

Okay my method is a bit cruel but I have heard it works really well. Does she have a girl cousin/friend that is about 4-6 years old? If she does set up a plan date and have the other mom and child know what is up. Every time the cousin has to go encourage your DVD to go watch. Basically, big girls use the potty; babies where diapers. If the other child can express this sentiment even better. This works exceptionally well with children who have physical control but need a change of mindset. Then, when she does start to go on the potty let her call the mom and other girl so she feels accomplishment and recognition.

You know, I do have a friend with a 4-year-old daughter who my daughter has played with before. This isn't a bad idea. On a similar note, DD is starting preschool next year and will be the second youngest in the class, and while I don't want to wait several more months to potty train, seeing all the other kids going potty while she's the only one still in diapers might just be the push she needs. So if all else fails, at least there's that.

DawnLilly · May 2014

Snapdragon750 said:

DawnLilly said:

Okay my method is a bit cruel but I have heard it works really well. Does she have a girl cousin/friend that is about 4-6 years old? If she does set up a plan date and have the other mom and child know what is up. Every time the cousin has to go encourage your DVD to go watch. Basically, big girls use the potty; babies where diapers. If the other child can express this sentiment even better.

This works exceptionally well with children who have physical control but need a change of mindset. Then, when she does start to go on the potty let her call the mom and other girl so she feels accomplishment and recognition.

You know, I do have a friend with a 4-year-old daughter who my daughter has played with before. This isn't a bad idea. On a similar note, DD is starting preschool next year and will be the second youngest in the class, and while I don't want to wait several more months to potty train, seeing all the other kids going potty while she's the only one still in diapers might just be the push she needs. So if all else fails, at least there's that.

Really sorry about all the spelling errors. My new phone doesn't know me yet :P

LC122 · May 2014

So, one rule of parenting is not to get in a power struggle you can't win. You can't *make* a child potty (or eat or sleep), you can only encourage them to do so or create incentives (praise, rewards, etc) for them to do so.
Like the PP mentioned, doing "big kid" things can be a real incentive.
Some people swear by finding your kid's "currency" - whether it be treats or stickers or praise or trips to the playground, whatever your kid wants and you can make happen. The slippery slope to this is the kid wanting a reward every time and/or learning to work the system by sprinkling out a few drops and then collecting a prize and repeating. Some people say they can easily drop the rewards, some are held hostage by them. One trick if you go this route is to be a slot machine not a soda machine. Instead of a reward every time, sometimes nothing, sometimes something, sometimes jackpot.

About pull-ups...personally, I wouldn't bother. They are just another form of diaper. We literally switched out all diapers in the house for underwear and never looked back. It was awesome.
My neighbor was petrified of her kid having an accident in the car, especially on long trips. She said she would put a pull-up on OVER her daughter's underwear so that she would still feel the underwear and feel if it got wet, but the car was protected just in case. I haven't followed up with her to see if/how that worked. I do know her kid was in & out of underwear & diapers/pull-ups and took a lot longer to potty train than our daughter.
I think overall, you should try to keep it positive and treat it like the very normal thing that it is - all grown-ups and big kids use the potty. Successes are to be celebrated, accidents can be met with "better luck next time".
If your child has issues with rashes and wiping, she should learn pretty quickly that it is a lot less messy when everything goes in the potty.

Good luck, OP. Have confidence in your daughter's abilities (and tell her and let her overhear you telling others) and your ability to keep your cool and help her figure it out.

SusieBW · May 2014

Maybe it is kind of mean to "shame" your kid into potty training, but our DD really took the "babies wear diapers" thing to heart. She was really big on the whole "I'm not a baby!" thing to begin with, so when we would tell her that diapers were for babies, she was done with them. She was also always pretty comfortable with going on the toilet to begin with, so maybe it was just the last step for her, but either way, it worked. And we used to give her 1 M&M for peeing and 2 for pooping on the potty. If she had accidents in her underwear, though, we were never ever shaming about it - we would just patiently explain that when she felt like she might have to go, she should tell a grown up right away so someone could help her. We used pull-ups when we went out and regular undies at home for a while, until she seemed to have a pretty good handle on it. Now, I still keep an extra pair of pants, undies and socks in the car, just in case.
Good luck!

ashiscute · May 2014

Why are you taking her every 20 mins? And why would you make her sit 5- 10 mins at a time? No offense, but that seems like crazy overkill. We started going potty every 30- 45 mins with DD (or anytime she asked to go or was showing signs of needing to pee). If she peed great, if not she got down and we tried again next time. We did not do prizes for sitting on the potty or for going on the potty. I think that's unnecessary personally. If your LO is ready they will go without those.

As for pull-ups we did use them but only at nap or bedtime. During the day she wore underwear right from the get go and we just cleaned up accidents. The pull-ups were helpful for sleeping because most kids do not day and night train at the same time. We called pull-ups bedtime underwear.

I think it's best to take a more hands off approach and just kind of let your LO have the control. The more you try to "make it happen" the less likely she will oblige. Good luck.

Snapdragon750 · May 2014

ashiscute said:

Why are you taking her every 20 mins? And why would you make her sit 5- 10 mins at a time? No offense, but that seems like crazy overkill. We started going potty every 30- 45 mins with DD (or anytime she asked to go or was showing signs of needing to pee). If she peed great, if not she got down and we tried again next time. We did not do prizes for sitting on the potty or for going on the potty. I think that's unnecessary personally. If your LO is ready they will go without those.

As for pull-ups we did use them but only at nap or bedtime. During the day she wore underwear right from the get go and we just cleaned up accidents. The pull-ups were helpful for sleeping because most kids do not day and night train at the same time. We called pull-ups bedtime underwear.

I think it's best to take a more hands off approach and just kind of let your LO have the control. The more you try to "make it happen" the less likely she will oblige. Good luck.

The first day I took her whenever it felt like a convenient interval (probably every 45 minutes to an hour), but I had no luck. The next day I did every 20 minutes because a friend suggested it, and I'd read that others have done it, so I gave it a try. Like you said, though, it felt like overkill, so I only did it for that one day. While I did manage to "catch" DD right when she had to go so she DID go on the potty once or twice, I don't feel like that's really potty training.

Also, to clarify: I don't MAKE my DD sit for 5-10 minutes; she HAS sat for 5-10 minutes because she didn't want to quit reading her book or because I was busy with the baby or got the front door and I hadn't told her to get off yet, and she hadn't called to me to ask or gotten off herself. My DD is not typical for her age in how long she can and likes to sit still--she'll sit at the computer and skype for 20-30 minutes, she'll sit with a book and read for 20 minutes, she'll sit for an entire disney movie without getting off the couch. Still, max I have actually made her sit on the potty is 4 minutes, and that's only if I was pretty sure she had to go and if I was reading to her or she had a book with her.

I am philosophically anti-bribe, but I did all the positive encouraging and modeling and book-reading that everyone suggests for months until I finally resorted to prizes, and only then because I thought it would be a gentler approach than just putting her in underwear and letting her wet herself. Since she cries for me to "CLEAN IT!!" when she spills a drop of milk on her placemat, I was afraid this might traumatize her away from underwear forever. So that's why she's in pull-ups and getting jellybeans...but still we're getting nowhere.

I generally stay away from power struggles and I know DD likes to do things her way, so if it weren't for her issues with dirty diapers I'd let her stay in diapers until kindergarten. But I'm starting to feel like the struggles with wiping her messy poop are borderline traumatic. Obviously if potty training won't work it won't work and we'll have to try again when she's older, but I feel like I have to give it a shot.

teenybean · May 2014

let her go naked all day at home. Only pants no underwear if you have guests for awhile...they feel snug like diapers and kids often pee in them immediately. This worked really well for us, we trained two boys (although I feel like they trained themselves) this way really easily at about 2 years of age. We had them sit backwards on the potty, no baby potty, my oldest uses the insert seat for pooping. As for undies and night time if we had a few days of success at home, we'd test to see if they could go out or sleep without an accident. If not we'd put diapers on at those times and recheck in a week. No pullups. We'd sing and dance and cheer for them asking to go potty and sitting there even without success, no candy etc. Daytime at home was done in days, car rides and sleeping took a couple more months because esp. with my youngest his bladder control wasn't perfect yet. Sometimes he'd fail to actually empty it by taking frequent trips with a drip here or there and then a few hours of that would go by and his bladder would fill and he couldn't manage to get there in time when it was full if that makes sense. Both were completely done with all of it including overnight with no accidents by 2.5. And we never pressured either of them, we waited until they showed interest, we always let them come in the bathroom with us, play with TP, practice flushing, talked about poo/pee.

Remember that nobody's teenager is using diapers, relax, don't stress it will happen.

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