Have a New Kid by Friday - Dr Kevin Leman [81]
Of course, these little tools won’t potty train your child. But they’ll be good aides along the way. Make the case to your child that he’ll be a big boy and can do it “by self” (very important to a toddler). The important thing is that the child needs to be responsible to feel those urges of when he needs to go instead of Mom asking him every couple minutes, “Do you need to go?” If Mom tries to help too much, she’ll weaken her child’s self-confidence. Will you have accidents along the way? Sure. But as the child has an accident and helps to clean up the mess (instead of Mom racing to do it for him) he realizes, Uh-oh, I waited too long. Gotta get there when I first feel I gotta go.
Some parents use pull-ups at night. They see it as a progression. But if you really want to potty train a child, I would say, “If he’s old enough to say ‘I want a pull-up,’ he should be toilet trained.” If you tell the child, “Honey, we ran out of pull-ups and don’t have any more,” most children will accept that. By not having the pull-ups available, you make it incumbent on the child to take charge of his own bladder.
A talk show host once said to me about his son, “Hey, Doc, little Jake won’t do #2 unless we put a Pampers on him. Then he does it in his Pampers. What can I do about that?” That’s simply crazy, to put it bluntly. If the child can ask for a Pampers in order to do #2, he can get himself to the potty in time. That child is manipulating you and enjoying every minute of it. He’s in charge of the house, not you. And that’s not good for the child or for you.
My wife made a colossal mistake with the firstborn of our brood of 5. She decided she was going to pick the day Holly would be toilet trained. She had read a book by two psychologists about toilet training and was determined to do it by the book. I reminded her that I was a psychologist too, and I saw things differently, but that didn’t matter. My firstborn wife, who knows how things are, banished me from the house for the day and demanded no interference. With potato chips and M&Ms—things that would clog your veins and kill you 20 years down the road and weren’t normally in our house—she proceeded with “the plan.” By the end of the day, Holly was patting the potty and saying, “Potty, potty”—as the “potty” ran down her leg.
We parents often think we know what’s best for our kids, but the reality is that all children have a time clock implanted in them for potty training. It’s called readiness, and you can read the signs. The child begins to mimic your behavior of going potty, asking questions and wanting to follow you into the bathroom. So you take the next step. You buy the Kmart plastic potty, put it on the floor, and let it become a fixture in your bathroom. You don’t make a big deal out of it, so the kid doesn’t think it’s a big deal (and thus a way to control Mom or Dad).
When the child sees that potty, you explain calmly that it’s her potty, one she can use. It’s low to the ground and easy to sit on. With this method, many moms are pleasantly surprised at how easily potty training happens when they’re not pushing to get the job done. Often the curious child will be found in the bathroom, trying out that new potty for herself!
When the child hops on that potty and goes #1 (the easier of the two), then make a thing of it (but not a huge thing). “My, look at that. You did that all by yourself!” are encouraging words to a child. If you want to back it up with a treat, you can do that. But I don’t think it’s a good idea. Why not? If you surveyed all your friends and asked them, “How many of you have gone potty today?” the majority would