Someone has pointed out that anytime before 18 months, you are really toilet training the parent.
For me, for quite a while, I didn’t express disappointment when she didn’t make it. She would wet herself, and then tell us. Sometimes my wife would show disappointment, but my philosophy is that her letting us know was just part of the process. After a number of times, she got more consistent to where she could say when she needed to go.
It look a little loner for her to be able to poo in the toilet, but that seems normal. We also would say “Minnie (her big girl panties) are sad that she got all dirty” but didn’t make it a big deal. In time she got really good at telling us that as well. We would make a big deal when she did it in the toilet, but that didn’t seem to make much of an effect.
I really believe that each child has their own preferred way of learning, and if your and her/his styles match, or if you can modify your ways, it works really well. I don’t think the method described above would have worked for us, but that says absolutely nothing about if it’s a good method or not. Obviously, it works very well for some. Another reason it wouldn’t work for us is that our kids are in day care.
Yeah, Howard puts up a massive fuss about going to the toilet, so taking him “every 10 or 15 minutes” would mean that we never did anything else, all day long. He also can hold urine for 12 hours without breaking a sweat, and will if he’s being forced to sit on the potty. Poop he can hold for three days without trying, and another two or so with some visible effort. But I have seen him walking funny, taken him to the potty (with massive protests that he didn’t have to go), had him produce nothing, and then drop a major load in his shorts less than two minutes later. He gets rewards for cooperating (jelly beans, which he adores and never gets for anything else any more), but the “reward” of not giving in is greater.
Now, he will go use the bathroom on his own when the daycare teacher tells him to. It never works for Mom and Dad. They have potty breaks scheduled into their day every hour or two, and he’s pretty compliant about those. (For pee. Poop at daycare is a rare occurrence, although he does poop in the potty most of the time when he goes there.) Telling him to go potty at home is no good. Someone has to take him there and sit with him.
My son and I got into a power struggle over it. Finally one day when he was about 3.5, I told him that I’d stop asking and let him tell me when he was ready. I outlined what he’d get if he was completely toilet trained (new underwear, go to preschool, which included field trips and school bus rides), but also told him that it was ok if he wasn’t ready. Four days later he was completely toilet trained and started preschool two weeks later (they’d been waiting for him to move from the pre-preschool room to preschool; he was almost entirely trained, but poop was the final frontier).
My daughter, 2.5, was “completely” potty trained for about two weeks. That was four or five months ago. Apparently potty usage got old quickly. She’s now back in diapers until the lure of new Dora undies becomes too much. After my first I don’t really care to argue about it. If anything, she’s more muleheaded than he is. In the next few weeks we’ll try again and see what happens.
My kids are grown now 38 and 44. My ex-wife and I had absolutely no parenting skills. She came from a single mom in extreme poverty down south with 7 siblings and 6 different fathers. I came from a dysfunctional family of eight. Our kids came out as perfect as would could ask for. They got love, real attention, dicipline and rules with no compromise from the age of birth. By the age of two years old dicipline was a non issue. I give my wife credit for the earlier years and I take a bit more of the credit for the later years. We never had to wake up and feed when they were babies. She fed on a schedule and never inbetween. Rules were rules and breaking them was never acceptable. Our kids adored us then and still do today, even though we divorced we have remained a very close family unit. I was such a screw up I never could imagine my kids comming out so well.
Our day care has meetings a couple of times a year, and parents can share what is happening with their kids. One of the most common comments is that the kids will do things at day care which they won’t at home. I think it really shows how strong peer pressure is, even at a young age.
My two cents on the potty conundrum (six kids, two still in diapers, FWIW): If your child isn’t ready, several months of enforced potty sitting is wasted time. When s/he is ready, the transition is pretty quick - a week or two, without big power struggles. Sure, as a parent, it’s frustrating, and you hear far too many “helpful” acquaintances say stuff like “My little Johnny was fully trained at 14 months” and you wonder if you’re just doing things all wrong. You aren’t. You’re fine. Your kid is fine. And your helpful acquaintance is deluded.
Also, a little trick that worked for mine, which may or may not be helpful to you: Pull ups are useful, but only under certain circumstances. For at-home training, the kids were either in regular underpants, or buck naked. I put pull ups OVER their underwear for sleeping or away from home - basically to contain leaks. The feeling of wet underwear (or worse) is icky enough that most kids won’t decide their activity is more interesting than using the pot.
For me having my son in daycare made potty training easier. Peer pressure is a powerful thing, and my son didn’t want to be the only one not using the potty. We started him at 2.5 years old, but it took a while to stick. It seems like it finally clicked when he turned three years old.
We used minor bribery to get him to use the potty. We’d give him a candy treat if he went number one or number 2. It took time, and at times it felt like it was taking two steps forward and then one step back. I think that it really depends on when the child is ready. Once he was finally ready, he stopped having accidents and started doing number two in the potty. We also replaced our toilet seats with ones that have a smaller second seat for a toddler to use.
Getting him to give up his pacifier was the hardest. He had them stashed all over the house. When his teeth came in, he would eventually rip them, but he always seemed to have another one. I finally did a search in his room, and got rid of the rest of them.
We’ve tried that and he keeps escalating until he gets a consequence.
We think we have figured out the why (this is usually the hard part of love and logic, BTW). We are pretty sure that when people get close to him, he uses his behaviour to push us away. Then, when we care enough to respond to his behaviour, he feels relief. We need a way to get him to trusting us and believing we will be there for him no matter what without the behaviour.
Our potty training was basically one long weekend. The little Torqueling was 2 plus one month; my wife took a long weekend and made it Potty Boot Camp. Home with the kiddo, all day long, no going out to throw off the routine. Salty snacks, so she would drink more and thus have more chances to practice.
One thing we did was put on the big-girl panties inside the diaper. Diapers these days are so absorbent that a kid doesn’t get much of an indication of when an accident happens. When there’s wetness held near their skin, they get uncomfortable, and they’ll want it to not happen, so there’s an incentive to learn. You’ll have to wash a lot of underwear, but them’s the breaks.
And of course really talk up how awesome it is that they’re wearing “big-kid” underwear, and how grown up they are, and loads of praise for success.
Interesting. I think this is exactly why one should never take a parenting book/method and blindly follow it.
His approach sort of sucks for him as well. It gets him his security, but at what a cost. Still, it’s better to figure this out when he’s young and not in his 30s, 40s or 50s which the rest of us figure it out, if we ever do. I had a girlfriend who never did (one of those crazy ones, which I was as well, we deserved each other.)
So, anyway to help him learn a better way of feeling secure or will this take a few years?
We had gotten past all this and then it just all started again. I am sincerely hoping that if we just keep being consistent (and loving, yadda yadda) that it will fade back.
He seems to have pretty much stopped it with me. However, he has upped the intensity with my husband.
My daughter is doing the weirdest thing. She is 8 months old and for the last month or so she occasionally will take her pacifier and shove it into my mouth for a second before taking it back and putting it in her mouth. I like her learning to share and all but this is just strange. Any idea why she would do this?
Heh. Ever since the Little One had her first birthday, my mom has gone on and ON about how I was fully potty trained by my first birthday, and why wasn’t I potty training her, and she was so smart (she is a pretty bright kid) that I was being a bad mom by not potty training her, etc. Finally at 2 1/4 we did potty training because she was actually showing signs of readiness (interest in the toilet, etc.) – and she took to it fairly well. Then we had the thing where she refused to use non-home toilets, so I was complaining to my mom about having to do non-home toilet training all over again, and she was all “Oh, just use a pullup. That’s what I did whenever we went anywhere or on any trips or anything.”
…oh. So I wasn’t actually fully potty trained at the age of one! Okay, mom…
I was wondering about that. I also wonder if your husband can get some good physical play together. Your son may just need more attention during this stage than other kids, maybe?
Yup. You’ll see a lot of this. And sharing isn’t going to be a concept for quite a while yet.
Kids do weird, quirky things. Since she was able to move, my daughter has made it a habit of wallowing in me. Not just touching me, I mean she yanks my shirt up to expose my stomach, then yanks hers up and rubs her belly on mine. Then she rolls onto her back to rub her back on me. Then she flips over and rubs her legs on my still bare belly, front and back. Then she sits up near my head and rubs her arms and face all over my chest, neck and throat. If I’ll let her, she’ll tuck her feet into my pants while I’m cuddling her and knead my stomach like a cat with them. If I’m carrying her, she’ll rub her elbows on my neck and chest and, if she’s sitting on my lap will stand up, hike up her shirt and rub her belly on my throat.
It’s adorable, but bizarre. What’s possibly stranger than that is that I absolutely love it.
Sort of a zombie thread but advice appreciated. I have a 21 month old boy and we just had a baby girl (almost 2 months). Boy is a good kid but lately has been going ballistic. The last straw was at his playgroup today when ever other kid managed to handle the transitions in activities except our little terror. He just screams no and runs off and does his own thing. Any advice or suggestions? May plan is to stat the walk away whereby I make sure he is safe but walk away when the tantrums start.
The terrible twos are setting in. That’s really a misnomer because they usually last for few years.
It’s really about him asserting his individuality and trying to make his own decisions rather than have decisions thrust upon him. I really don’t know about advice; it’s been a while since we went through it. You just have to soldier on and find a way to cope that works for both you and him.
He’s not going to listen to reason, so just don’t give him the attention he’s looking for is my guess.