I’m about at the end of my rope. She’ll be 4 in July, and she just started wearing underpants. She’s gotten pretty good at peeing in the potty. A few accidents, but generally she’s trying and making progress.
But she refuses to use the toilet for poop. She just goes in her pants. I tried offering a pony ride for pooping in the potty, as well as a toy shopping spree. I tried threatening to put diapers back on her. I just told her if she does it again (not even trying - I’m OK with accidents if she tries to make it), no TV for a day. It doesn’t seem to make a dent.
Wait until she’s ready. And by ready I mean wait until she says “Toilet, please!”
Put her back in diapers until then. Don’t make it a shame thing, just a “Mommy made a mistake. If you’re not ready to use the toilet, then you need to wear diapers. When you’re ready to use the toilet all the time like Mommy does, then we’ll go back to underpants.”
Really, aren’t diapers easier to clean up than soiled underpants, anyway? Not to mention how much more of a pain it is to find a bathroom in the 3.2 seconds you’ve got between, “Mommy, I gotta go!” and splashdown. I never understood why (barring old-school preschools who had their own arbitrary limits) parents are so quick to rush the toilet use.
All the bribes in the world won’t help if she doesn’t care. They just train Mommy to be an M&M dispenser. She’s a human being with her own timetable and needs, not a trained poodle.
I think WhyNot is right. Obviously you want her to be where the other kids her age are, but if she’s not ready she’s not ready. Does she have a slightly older child she looks up to? That might be a motivator.
How to tell she’s ready? She might start asking, but she also might start finding ways to poop in private and will wait till then. My feeling is, if she can hold it till it’s time to go stand over by the radio in the kitchen (my son’s favorite spot) then she can go in the potty. Before then, just use a diaper.
BTW, my son started doing the radio in the kitchen thing first thing in the morning before we took his pull up off so we made a rule, no pull ups allowed downstairs and that was the final step to full poop in the potty-tude.
The M&M bribe thing worked with our first kid; the second was just too stubborn to play along. She wouldn’t be rushed, so we stopped trying except to hold out the promise of underpants until she did it, and we continued to put her in diapers. One day she just said, I want to wear underpants today. And an hour later, she’s pooping on the potty. She never looked back and with the exception of, I think, 3 minor pee accidents, she’s been very reliable ever since. And she’ll be 4 in the fall.
You have no idea how long your rope is, says the father of three.
She’s three. Three. July is four months away, a tenth of her life. What might you learn in two-four years? She’ll poop in the potty someday soon, and for the rest of her life. Your only choice is, how much do you want to screw it up?
Bribery is fine at this age, if it isn’t combined with guilt: reward for performance equals cause-and-effect reasoning as well as poop in the potty. I will say, for some reason, our kids always responded best to … applause. This may be the result of watching Jeopardy on T.V.
Is it possible there’s some medical reason? Maybe she’s not feeling the urge to poop, or doesn’t recognize it?
Of course, you can always bring her in with you, then let her flush the toilet and wave bye-bye when you have a BM, but really, it’s just patience, if there’s nothing wrong.
My son would just go to the potty, fart (or just sit for two seconds), and proceed to demand a candy (we used jelly beans), but wouldn’t actually go poop in the potty. I stood firm at ‘If you actually do something, then you get a candy’ but I stopped because I was tired of the meltdowns multiple times a day because he wanted candy.
That was just before he turned three, and now I figure he just wasn’t ready yet then. Now I’m just letting him do his thing. Take him upstairs at regular intervals or when he asks. He still doesn’t go all the time in the toilet, but the last few days he’s been doing little poops on it. I figure that’s a good sign.
He’s a little younger than your daughter, just a few months this side of 3. I don’t really think you can force it. Take her to the bathroom, if she has a usual time she goes poop take her then, and she’ll get it.
Dr. Phil has got a pretty interesting method. It’s kinda lengthy, but involves using whatever cartoon/fiction character that is her favourite as a model. I don’t have time to review sites for you right now but if you search on Dr. Phil’s potty training you’ll find quite a few sites. Seems dude has figured out how to potty train in a very short time and people find that it works well.
My daughter was 3 ish too and still learning. I had her sit for a bit even if she didn’t have to go. I think that is the hard part, the waiting and then they sometimes supress the urge until later. Make sure she has a comfortable potty seat that she could put on the big toilet. keep some books nearby. Run the water for a bit, sometimes a reassuring back rub or pat and some company while they get seated helps allay anxiety. Relaxationn is key to pleasant BM’s.
Maybe she can learn to deliver own bombs to the toilet, tell her where the poop goes, in the pipes with other poops yay(im not kidding she was intent about knowing). Sometimes in the warm tub they get the urge to go, swiftly get her on the toilet so that association is made.
She’ll get the hang of it, and then hopefully she takes to the hand wash routines ea and every time.
I agree (as usual) with WhyNot. It took both my children (a boy and a girl) a long time to poop in the potty. Would you bribe or guilt a child into walking when they weren’t ready? Of course not. I don’t think we can put a judgement on why she’s not ready to poop on the potty, she just isn’t. Whether it’s because her musculature is not developed or because she’s anxious or scared, she’s just not ready.
Put her into diapers with no fanfare (I love WhyNot’s script) and let her mature. Try again in a few weeks or so. When my kids were finally ready they became totally potty trained in a couple of days.
I knw it’s frustrating (trust me, I know )- but she will be fine! They always are- kids get potty trained, if we just let them trust their own body it becomes so much less stressful!
Make a detailed chart to track the time of day. (several days worth) If you chart it in detail, you’ll find out when she goes. You’ll likely be suprised at how regular it is. (at least I was) With this information you can put her on when she needs to go, since you’ll have a very good idea ahead of time.
You’ll probably think you already know this just from experience, but the monitoring it with a chart makes it much more reliable.
You can still use whatever incentive/reward you want upon success. But the habit should grow. YMMV
I realize I should have elaborated, sorry. We have been laid back about the whole thing till the past couple weeks. She got interested in Curious George underpants, so we gave it a shot, also using M&Ms (1 for sitting, 2 for peeing, 3 for pooping). She caught on to the peeing thing in a couple days - I was pretty astonished. Today spent all morning out & about, and she stayed dry.
Now, the reason why I went ahead, and why I’m frustrated by the pooping issue is that this behavior:
Has been going on for months and months now. Long before she could tell what was going on with her bladder, she would creep away to poop. She’ll go in another room and say, "Don’t talk to me! or “I need privacy!” So I (dumbly) figured that meant she could make it to the potty. Actually, I think it is clear that she can. Yesterday I tried to hang around her and remind her to use the potty at times it seemed like it might be time. The only result is she didn’t poop at all yesterday. :smack: So the control seems to be there.
OK, deep breath . . . I’m trying to take WhyNot’s and **King of Soup’s ** advice to heart. She can physically, but for whatever reason, she won’t for now. OK. Maybe I will just go back to pullups, explaining that I made a mistake (she is used to hearing that ). It just kills me cause she will pee in the pullup instead of bothering with the toilet, and she’s made so much progress with that.
Also, yeah, preschool is in September, and I suddenly feel like I’m working against a deadline here.
My son didn’t learn until he was four. And we had a couple of false starts as well where we thought “Yay! He’s got it!” and then he backslid.
Basically he just didn’t care that much. He was the kind of baby who would happily lay around in a poop-filled diaper without making a peep. (Unlike my daughter who made it very clear that she wanted to be changed RIGHT THIS INSTANT.) He didn’t care that much about rewards and we didn’t want to start punishing him for something that might be outside his range of abilities.
No my own experience but my brother’s with both of his girls: they flatly refused to poop in the toilet for the longest time and would demand to be put in a diaper whenever they needed to poop. They were completely potty trained in terms of peeing but it took a good 6 months or so to actually get them to poop in the toilet.
Every kid is different. Mine wanted to potty train because all the other kids in daycare were doing it. Practically trained herself.
)- but she will be fine! They always are- kids get potty trained, if we just let them trust their own body it becomes so much less stressful!