Elena is now 15 1/2 months old and we’ve been working on potty training for the past couple of months, believe it or not. We are by now means experts and I don’t want to remotely come across that way. But, I wanted to share what we’re doing just to throw the ideas out there for what it’s worth. The longer I’m a parent the more firmly I believe that there is no cookie cutter method for anything you do with your family. I had originally planned on following the method where you take like a solid weekend and ALL YOU DO is potty train and then you’re done. But, my husband had other ideas and, well, he won.
My husband is absolutely awesome with our daughter. He grew up as the 2nd oldest of 5 boys and he basically raised his youngest brother (who’s still only 14). One of the things he did with his youngest brother is help potty train. I, on the other hand, have never potty trained anybody! I gladly defer to him! 
I’m gonna get a little graphic here, so if you don’t have kids or don’t really wanna talk about the bathroom… stop reading now. Fair warning.
Most methods have you begin with teaching your child to go pee on the potty first. However, if you’re a parent, you know that it’s much easier to know when you’re child is going #2 than when they’re going #1! There’s faces, noises, and, of course, smells that go along with it. It’s so simple to know when your child needs to go #2 AND there’s time in there to rush them to the potty, whereas with #1, about the time you think they need to go, they’re done.
So, just one day my husband decided he’d make Elena just sit on the potty when it looked like she was getting ready to do #2 and he’d see what happened. Well, she went! She wanted to get off immediately and see what had happened! She flushed the toilet and was just thrilled with herself. From there on out, my husband got into a routine with our (very regular) daughter. They would sit on the potty in the morning before he went to work and again at lunch, then again sometime before bed. She began using the potty at least once a day and if we were lucky, two or three times a day.
Another thing that’s popular is to reward your child with M&Ms or cookies or something when they go potty. Elena has gotten treats twice for going potty. The rest of the time, she’s perfectly happy with getting to flush and waving “bye-bye” to everything in the bowl.
Now that I’m not in school and I’m home with her consistently, I make her sit on the potty fairly often throughout the day – after naps, after meals, before bed, before baths, etc. She’s peeing on the potty much more often, although by far not every time. However, thanks to consistency, we haven’t changed a poopy diaper in a solid three weeks, if not closer to a month.
The hardest part is keeping her entertained while sitting on the potty. She takes a long time sometimes and it’s just sitting there on the toilet. She gets bored pretty much instantly. Now that we’ve bought her one of those kiddy seats that sits on top of the toilet, it’s a lot easier to keep her entertained since we don’t have to hold her up so she doesn’t slip into the toilet! So, we keep a supply of easy to play with toys in the bathroom – bath toys, simple books. We also let her play with the toothpaste, a cup, a comb – random items in the bathroom. It keeps her totally happy and about the time she gets bored, she’s done!
Brian has also taught her how to push. Now, this is honestly hilarious! We tell her to push and she leans forward and goes, “Ehhhhhhh” and her face gets all red and she pushes as hard as she can, but she makes the noise like that! Then she laughs and laughs when it actually works! Oh, it’s a riot!
I am not a believer in having the potty seat and carrying it with you from room to room. I have no desire to have to clean the seat, for one. But, I also think it’s good for the child to get used to sitting on the toilet itself. We’ve taken Elena to people’s houses and she’s fine with sitting on toilets not in her own house because she’s used to it. She doesn’t need the kiddy potty seat to use the bathroom. I also think it shows that you can take your time with your child to sit in the bathroom with them and set apart time to be with them and help them – not just merely plop them down on a portable seat so you can keep working.
Consistency is so key, though. At the beginning, if we were lazy with it for a day or two, it took us three or four more days to get her back on track. But, now that we’re in a routine and we keep an eye on her, she’s doing just fine and we’re well on our way to
I am 100% positive that this method won’t work for everyone. But, to sum up, the things we’ve learned that I thought I’d pass along are:
- Starting with teaching the child to go poop on the potty first is a heck of a lot easier. You can tell when they’re going so you can stop them and make them run to the bathroom (which stops them from finishing so they can go on the potty). The sensation of a bowel movement is a lot easier for the child to recognize (and hold off) than a urinary movement. Plus, they (at least Elena) think it’s fun to hear the “sploosh” and they really do know that something came out of them and something is going bye-bye in the water.
- Be consistent. Especially if you start with them going #2 on the potty and your child is fairly regular, it’s pretty easy to know when to sit them on the potty. Start with times like shortly after waking up, after meals, and before bedtime. Then branch out to before and after naptimes, mid-morning and mid-afternoon, and early evening well before bedtime.
- Keep toys and gadgets on hand to play with in the bathroom to keep them distracted and to make sitting on the potty fun, not a chore.
- Make the “reward” for going simple things – flushing the toilet, washing their hands, clapping and cheering, hugs from parents. The bigger deal you make of it, the more they’ll want to do it because they enjoy the attention.
Our big accomplishment today: Elena went with her daddy on a trip to the store and drank a bunch of juice and had a snack while they were gone. Brian checked her diaper before the trip home and she was dry. She got home and I made her come to the bathroom just in case and wouldn’t ya know it, she went pee on the potty. I got to put back on the same unused diaper. It felt like such an accomplishment.
Ellie
February 4, 2012 at 7:27 pm
Giggling… because I am thinking of what happened with “poop training” in our home. It was with our second, and he had a potty seat in the bathroom. We kept it in the bathroom at all times, but with three kids running around the house, I didn’t have time to sit with a child in the bathroom, so a toilet seat worked fine. He could pull down his padded undies and sit on it himself. He was sitting, and he did his poop. I wasn’t there to admire his accomplishment, so he did the logical thing in his mind…. he reached in, picked up his ‘prize” and brought it out to show me.
Would have been bad enough, except that I was opening the door and welcoming my new day care child and his dad. Still surprised the dad left the child when we was greeted by a very happy toddler waving a very large piece of poop!
And I had to balance the joy and excitement of “yay! you did it in the potty” with the absolute horror of “eww! we don’t carry poopies around!”. I settled for a simple, “when we poop, we leave the poop in the bathroom. Then we call mommy, and I will come, ok?”
Still another of my kids was horrified and terrified by the fact that the toilet ate what he deposited there, and would scream at the thought of sitting on a device that could swallow part of him whole.
Toilet training is such a fun adventure! Enjoy!