My daughter (about to turn 4) is terrible about insisting she doesn’t have to go until she has to go right now. We finally just had to establish some rules about certain times when she must go sit on the potty before she can do the next thing on the agenda. We always tell her, “If you don’t need to go, you don’t have to make any pee, but you need to sit on the potty and try.” I don’t think she’s sat without going even once.
I would probably sit down with her (not at the moment you’re about to start playing) and tell her that you know she didn’t mean to (even though you really know she sort of did), but since she’s had several accidents, the rule from now on is that she has to sit on the potty before Hide and Seek can start. Every single time. Flexible rules just do not work at this age - it has to be without exception.
It sounds like she has all the required skills to be fully potty trained, but she lacked the motivation to make it a full-time habit. Fang had the same sort of problem, only from the other end. He would poop his pants, if he was too busy playing. Mrs. Magill and I finally shut the playroom door for a day [1] whenever he would go. We would tell him "you’re obviously having too much fun to remember to go potty when you need to, so we’re going to have to shut the door tomorrow, so you remember. Inside a week he was using the potty full-time.
[1] He had plenty of toys and things to do outside his playroom, but he wouldn’t have access to his trains.
Tell her that you wont be playing Hide and Seek again because it makes her pee,ignore all of the tantrums and emotional blackmail and stick by your decision for several days and then say maybe you could try it just once and if she doesn’t pee start the games up again.
It is likely that when its become an established routine again she’ll probably try it on and pee again when/if that happens then you stop the game for a much longer period.I
ts a good idea not to make it sound like its a punishment which might well let her wallow in self pity but just as an unfortunate consequence of her being unable to control her bladder.
In the old days kids(including myself I might add )who used to get temperemental or throw tantrums were allowed to overhear our parent telling another adult “He’s tired and grumpy we’ll put him to bed for a while”
And then despite our protests that we weren’t we had to spend what seemed like an eternity in a boring bedroom on our own without even the satisfaction of self pity resulting from being punished.
I suspect that if you do nothing at all the peeing might spread to other activities.
This is what we do with our 3 year old. He gets really engrossed in playing with his Leapster and has peed in his pants more than once. He is now required to try to go potty first. No potty, no Leapster. He always claims he doesn’t have to go, and we always say that he just has to try–and then he pees for about an hour.
Don’t just ask–insist she has to sit on the potty first.
Someone once told me to go outside and play “Hide and Go Fuck Yourself”, which I of course thought was hysterical, so the girlfriend and I use that one perhaps a little too frequently.
See, we approached it from the the other side. We knew he had the skill, he just needed a reason to want to use it. If he pooped or peed while playing with his trains, then he would have no trains the next day. Note: He wasn’t in trouble, and he wasn’t being punished. It was explained that he was having too much fun to remember to go potty. He was good to go in two weeks.
Please note: He was already potty trained, he just would “forget” (didn’t want to stop what he was doing)
Heh, I was well past my bed-wetting stage when I took a nap at my babysitter’s house and dreamed that I got up and went to the bathroom. She was not happy. (Sorry, Carol!)
I second this. When my boys were that age (okay I find myself still doing it with the 6 yr old at times) any sort of game/going out/whatever was always prefaced with: okay go potty now and then we’ll do <whatever>. We didn’t build the fort until the plumping was cleared to go. It just seemed the easiest and less confontational way to remind.
This all came about from the oldest who, at times, would have the bladder the size of a basketball or alternatively, a grape. I just got tired of constantly asking him if he had to go, and then kicking myself when he had an accident because I didn’t ask.
Thats when the 'Rentals wouldn’t stop the car on the way to some relatives we were visiting because they wanted to ‘make up time’. Yes, my rest room was an empty coke can in the back seat of a station wagon. Damned tricky forcing yourself to stop when the can’s almost full though…
I’m told that once while sleepwalking at something like four years old my little brother was caught just before he was about to pee on me (I was asleep). How he mistook my bedroom for the bathroom I’ll never know, except that he was asleep and all.
As the mother of five year who managed potty training shortly before her 4th birthday I find this thread hysterically funny. That’s one of the great joys of parenthood: the chance to act like a little kid again.