How do you get a 3yo to poop on the potty?

[jjimm]

Sing the Japanese potty song!

[Sam_I_Am]

@Unauthorized Cinnamon

Also, yeah, preschool is in September, and I suddenly feel like I’m working against a deadline here.

September is still a long way away. You’ve got time for a plan.

We had similar issues last year. Our daughter made the transition to underwear & peeing in the toilet in one day. She asked a day later to not wear diapers at night. I said “but sweetie, you still pee at night”. She replied “I won’t”. We gave it a shot, and sure enough, the only night-time accident we had involved jet lag after travelling 1/2 way round the world.

Poop, though, there was no way she would make that transition. So we worked on steps. Pull-ups were fine, but we expected her to go in the bathroom to poop (in her pullup), because that’s where we all poop. Next, we worked on her trying pooping in the pullup while sitting (I think most of her trouble was that sitting & pooping is very different muscle-wise than standing and pooping). We also played-up other aspects of it, such as the fun plop sounds and watching it flush down. We talked about how if we didn’t have to buy diapers, we could buy her something else fun instead.

Finally, when we thought she really was ready, we asked her what she would trade her last diapers for. She had a golden train for her wooden tracks, and decided she wanted golden train tracks to use it on. One can of spray paint later, she gave up the diapers and pooped in the potty.

[robby]

My son was three, and still not potty-trained for poop. He had full control of pee, but kept going poop in his pullups.

In frustration, I finally just asked him, “Why won’t you go in the toilet?!” Unlike my wife, whose similar question was rhetorical, I actually listened to his response.

He replied, “I don’t like the sound it makes when it splashes.”

I immediately told him, “I can fix that.” I went upstairs and got a set of shooting ear muffs, and told him that they were “magic ear muffs” that would keep him from hearing the sound.

Just like that, he was trained. He used the ear muffs for a few weeks, and gradually didn’t need them anymore.

[MoodIndigo1]

@jjimm

Sing the Japanese potty song!

I love that! Thanks for posting it.

As for the OP, we all worry about when our children “should” be potty-trained, but it always happens, sooner or later. Relax, you seem to be doing fine.

[Redfrost]

Squeeze her real hard?? Just kidding. I have 5 kids, 3 of them are potty trained. We just had to get used to cleaning poopy pants. Ewwww!! Yer youngin will eventually tire of the mess and will have better timing.

[Autolycus]

Duct tape.

[Miss_Purl_McKnittington]

@robby

I immediately told him, “I can fix that.” I went upstairs and got a set of shooting ear muffs, and told him that they were “magic ear muffs” that would keep him from hearing the sound.

For some reason, the thought of a toddler sitting on the toilet with a pair of shooting earmuffs is cracking me up. Probably because the ear muffs would be absolutely huge on a toddler, and it’s a little incongruous with the bathroom.

[Tabula_Rasa]

When pooping in the potty is at stake, a parent will try anything…including the magical heavy hat that makes it easier to push the poop out. Or, um, so I’ve heard.

[Dangerosa]

We had great success with WhyNot’s method. Note that we used diapers, not pullups.

To my daughter, pullups were sufficiently like underwear to count. So no reason to potty train.

Diapers, on the other hand, worked wonders. She had an accident, it was back in diapers, she used the potty, it was underwear. Only about three days for her to decide to go to underwear.

BUT - we had a child who was physically ready, but didn’t want to stop being a “baby” and didn’t want to take the time from her busy life to use the potty.

We didn’t give her the lecture, or the plan - the independant “expert” that is our peditrician “explained” to her that babies wear diapers and Mommy had no choice…

[WhyNot]

@Autolycus

Duct tape.

laughing Stop that!

Unauthorized Cinnamon, (jeez, I love that name!) you’ve probably heard me say it before, because it’s sort of my parenting mantra: Kids have control over exactly two things in their lives: what they eat and when it comes out.

Obviously, she has the sensory awareness and sphincter control to hold it until she gets to the bathroom. But emotionally (or psychologically, if you like Freud), she needs to “win” this game. So stop playing. Let her “win”, and when it’s no longer about winning or losing, it’s no fun to play anymore. Maybe it’s because she’s afraid of something easy to solve (in which case asking and listening like **robby **might help) or it might be because she likes the extra attention of you following her around all day, or it might be because she really, really loves the squishy feel on her butt or she feels like she’ll fall in or she doesn’t want to “give her poopies away”. Who knows? Really, other than satisfying your curiosity, it doesn’t matter, and she probably won’t be able to articulate it anyway. She’s going to work through whatever it is in her own time.

I’ve seen impacted stool from kids withholding bowel movements from overeager parents. Did you know they have to chisel it out with a tool like a dental pick? It’s not fun. Don’t go there.

[Solfy]

Sweet merciful heavens, isn’t it the most frustrating thing?
We’ve just gone through a six month on again off again poop ordeal in our household.

Last fall our oldest, who had yet to turn two, for whatever reason decided she wasn’t pooping. Ever. She’d hold it in, screaming and clenching with the effort. Of course this made her constipated, which made everything worse. When she did finally go, it was miserable. (No one should pass anything as big as their forearm unless they’re giving birth.) That misery just reinforced her determination never to poop. Cue viscious cycle.

We consulted the pediatrician, who assured us that this was a common problem. We plied her with fiber and lots of liquids. Do you know that Benefiber is both easy to hide in a variety of foods/beverages and also obscenely expensive? On many occasions we had to resort to suppositories, which made more misery for all involved parties. We threatened. We begged. We bribed. Nothing was making that girl poop. We held off toilet training, not wanting to traumatize her further. (I’ve read it suggested that this nasty cycle can happen as a result of toilet training, but in our case it was spontaneous)

Every time we could get her moving again and we thought things were better it would start all over. When we had to give her a suppository, she would sit on the potty and try to push it back out. Eventually we figured that as long as she was pooping (once a week) on the potty, she might as well pee in it, too. She took to potty training like a champ but was still withholding bowel movements.

One day we had our usual serious talk about when you have to go, you have to go. The lightbulb finally went on. The next day, she went with no prompting and no screaming. Two days later (halleluia!) she went again. She’s been okay for two weeks now.

I know this isn’t the same problem that you have, but the moral of the story is the same - little kids will go where they want, when they want, and there is not a darned thing you can do about it. Keep reinforcing what needs to be done and wait it out. I guarantee your child will figure it out before the age of 16. It only feels neverending right now.
Good luck!

[Green_Cymbeline]

I am 31, and me, my brother, and my cousins who are +/- about 8 or so years of us, were all potty trained by 2 or 3… All the kids I babysat were potty trained by then - I never had to change a diaper on a kid older than that. I don’t think they even made diapers big enough for kids older than 2 back then. And in fact, I have heard people of my parents’ generation, born in the 1940s, say that they were trained by 1 1/2 at least (back before disposable diapers and before washers and dryers were common).

Anyway, is it just me or is it a new fad, within the past 10 years or so, to “let the kid decide when they’re ready” to use the toilet, even if that means well into their fourth year? Does anyone else who is 30 or older remember that we trained earlier than today’s kids?

Does anyone think the easy availability of disposable diapers and the fact that most people have washers and dryers makes it easier to put off potty training?

[sunstone]

Our two boys were completely different. The first practically trained himself at an early age…he didn’t like dirty diapers, and very quickly figured out that the potty was the way to go. I just paid a bit of attention, and asked if he wanted to got to the potty when he started acting twitchy. So no problem, as he soon began to tell me in advance that he was ready for the action.

The second son was a bit different. He was much more inclined to resist (anything) the whole idea of potty training, so I decided to let it slide. The breakthrough came during my summer vacation while I was at home with the kids…I told him to tell me if he needed to go potty (He went “OK” rather unconvincingly) and I began to work on a project at the work bench in the garage. I could see directly out the window to the sandbox where he was playing and saw him get that “look”…and he glance around and then obviously went in his pants. So after a very few minutes, he came in asking to be changed…but I said he would need to wait until I finished the operation that was midpoint…so after about 4 minutes I did look in his pants and saw a big mess. So I decided (without a lot of thought) that I would hose him off; we proceeded to do the dance of the hose in the back corner of the garden…he loved it!

But oddly enough, he always came and asked to go potty in time.

Not exactly a recommended method, but it was what clicked in his head. Right now he is going through the same thing with his son…JUSTICE!

Good Luck!

[StGermain]

Like nyctea scandiaca, when I was a kid, kids were potty trained early. In the case of my brother, the oldest child, my mother had him and my sister and was pregnant with twins. That’s 4 kids under the age of three. My mother told my brother that he was a big boy now, and big boys use the toilet. She put him in underwear and told him he’d be in big trouble if he wet his pants. So he didn’t. Not during the day, not at night.

I’m sure people think there’s some great reason to pander to a child’s desire in this regard. We make kids do all kinds of things they may not want to do - what’s so special about toilet training?

StG

[WhyNot]

@nyctea scandiaca

Does anyone think the easy availability of disposable diapers and the fact that most people have washers and dryers makes it easier to put off potty training?

I think it has something to do with it, but more than the availability of disposables is the superior dry feeling of ultraabsorbent disposables. It’s simply not so uncomfortable to hang out in a wet superabsorbent as a wet cloth or a wet wood pulp diaper. (Look how all the pull-ups styles are coming out with “feel wet” or “cool” liners so kids are purposefully uncomfortable in them.) Superabsorbents were the biggest part of the diaper market by the mid-90’s, and already the advice was child-led toilet training and had been for years. If anything, I think conventional wisdom had already begun to swung back a little bit to encouraging reward systems, sticker charts and parental pressure before the kid is really ready - mostly because of restrictive daycare and preschool requirements. Not until the babies of the crunchy granola hippie moms of the '70s grew up and had our own babies did we start talking about letting the kid set the pace again. And there’s not a little overlap with attachment parenting, cosleeping and extended breastfeeding. All those are indicative of a larger “do what works for you and your baby, and screw the peanut gallery” philosophy.

Still, long, long before superabsorbents, specialists were recommending not stressing over toilet training and letting your kid take the lead and tell you when s/he’s ready. The biggest change - delaying until 2 1/2, is not within the last 30 years but dates back to the late fifties/early sixties. In my copy of The Magic Years by Selma H. Fraiberg, first copyright 1959, she writes:

If we ask, “When is the best time to begin toilet training?” we can find some clues through a knowledge of child development. In order
for a child to cooperate in his toilet training he must be able to control the sphincter muscles, he must have the ability to postpone the urge to defecate, and he must be able to give a signal to be taken to the bathroom, or to get there under his own steam. In normal child development all of these conditions may not be present until fifteen to eighteen months, or later…

The important thing to remember is that no normally active child in the second year will submit to a method of training in which he is compelled to sit on a potty until he produces. It will require considerable parental pressure to get an active toddler to sit there for more than a few minutes, and such pressure or insistence will inevitable create rebellion and an inability to produce on the potty. Furthermore the method of regularly placing a child on the potty does not in itself induce a bowel movement, of course, and “works” as a method only in those cases where a child regularly tends to have bowel movements at a certain time, shortly after breakfast, for example. For those children who do not have their bowel movements at regular times (very possible these children are in the majority in the second year) this procedure will probably lead to an impasse between child and mother. From the child’s point of view this sitting on the potty seems completely foolish…

Whatever method we use we want to avoid pressure, contests of will, anxiety about getting to the potty, and shame about failure. We want to find ways in which we can enlist the child’s interest and cooperation in achieving bowel and bladder control. If we look upon this process as education that continues for months and if we take advantage of the child’s own readiness to participate in this process, we can patiently win the child’s interest and participation in his achievement.

She goes on to outline a pretty conventional behavioral conditioning program, using praise as the reward, which she fully expects to last a year or more - that is, throughout the second and third years. She does, in 1959, expect almost all children to be trained by 4.

Robert S Mendelsohn, MD in How To Raise A Healthy Child…In Spite of Your Doctor , published 1984, writes:

As for toilet training, pay no attention to medical advice, because your pediatrician doesn’t know any more about it than you do. It’s a family affair. It doesn’t make any difference, except in terms of your own convenience, whether you train your child early, late or neither of the above. Some children train readily. Others don’t, and I have no magic formula you can use if you have one of those. My daughters have, though. They turned to their mother for advice on training their children!
That’s the sum total of what he has to say about toilet training: Stop stressing, and ask your mother for advice, 'cause doctors know there’s a huge range of ages and don’t care much one way or the other.

My very favorite baby doc, Dr. T. Berry Brazelton wrote in his 1992 book touchpoints: The Essential Reference :

Problems in toilet training nearly always arise because of an asymmetry in the parent-child relationship. When parents are unable to wait, and they impose toilet training as their idea, the child will feel this as an invasion.

That’s not to say things haven’t changed and that potty training age isn’t a fashion, like everything else in parenting. It is, most definitely. But the major shift, from infant to late toddlerhood training, happened much longer ago than most people think. Now we’re just quibbling over a few months in either direction. Here’s an interesting timeline I found here :

WHEN TO TRY? A TIMELINE

Kids’ bodies haven’t changed over the years, but society’s expectations about toilet training and children have:

1928: Dr. Watson, a psychologist, recommends parents hold a pot under infants weeks after birth. Serious potty training begins at 3 months. Between the 1920s and 1940s, parents on average initiate toilet training at 12 months.

1945: Dr. Benjamin Spock, the famous pediatrician, suggests that potty training start at 7 to 9 months, an age when babies usually can sit up by themselves. Parents report initiating training on average at 18 months.

1962: Dr. T. Berry Brazelton, the pediatrician considered the successor to Spock, says parents are training children too early, after researching kids rebelling against potty training. He advises parents to wait until children are 24 to 30 months old. From the 1960s to the 1980s, parents, on average, initiate training at 2 years.

1980-1990: Parents initiate training at 2 ½ years. [How is this different than the 30 months listed above? This is one of those sneaky timeline entries that means nothing, because there’s no effective change but a gap of 3 decades. - WN]

1999: Worried that parents are pushing their children too early to get them into preschool or day care, Brazelton says children might not be ready for training until 3 or later. Children should be gradually introduced to the potty but receive little prompting. [So here’s a six month shift. - WN]

Today: One-third of kids are still in diapers after their third birthday. [And, again, what’s different about this from the 1999 listing above? If kids aren’t considered ready until 3 or later, we’d expect them to be in diapers after their third birthday. Nothing’s changed, other than the author wants us to think there’s a continued trend to later training when her data doesn’t support it. - WN]

Sources: The Everything Potty Training Book, by Linda Sonna, 2003;
“Toilet Training: Getting it Right the First Time”, Contemporary Pediatrics, March 2004, p. 105.

So we’ve gone from 2-2.5 in 1962 to 2.5 or 3 today. 6 months difference - not a huge change. Plus, I’m still convinced that lots, probably the majority, of those early trainers aren’t totally trained until later. That the process, as Selma Fraiberg admits, used to take months, where the let-em-wait-till-they-tell-you way takes a weekend. We do less laundry by keeping them in diapers and admitting they won’t stay dry than by changing them several times a day due to “accidents” but calling them trained.

[WishIHadACoolName]

For my son, we used PEZ candy. If he peed in the potty, he got one piece of PEZ, and if he pooped, we’d just hand over the dispenser. Then, he’d walk around the house sharing “his poop on the potty candy”. It took 3 days, total.

I have a niece who would say she needed a pull-up for pooping…until she was six years old! Her mother caved every time. Her father had her for a weekend without mom, and said “if you have to poop, you’ll use the toilet, or poop your pants. If you poop your pants, you’ll sit in it until bathtime”. By Sunday night, pullups were done! I repeat, she was SIX. I say, if the child “knows” and goes off to poop in private, she should be using the potty.

Let it also be said that I have an incontinent, low-functioning, autistic, almost 12 year old. Potty training and puberty, hand in hand… and yes, we do let him sit in his poop for a little while. Maybe if he’s uncomfortable, he’ll learn to go on the toilet.

[lee]

For mine, it took a promise of an overnight stay at grandma’s for the first time if she went a week without accidents. She decided that was a reward worth it and about a month after that she was potty trained completely.

We also made a point of working on other privileges unrelated to toilet training, which we granted her based on her being grown up enough to handle them. One was to play upstairs at times without a grown up for a while. We also started expecting her to be more helpful around the house, and praised her lavishly at first for her assistance. She often handles most of the table setting. Big step considering we eat on ceramic plates, sometimes china, and use glass glasses as well as cloth napkins, which need to be folded.

She demonstrated when we got the potty when she was two that she could go poop and pee in it if she wanted, once. Then refused to again. We put it away after a while and this last fall brought it out again. We avoided protracted battles, but like you, we were very frustrated because at one point it was clear that the only thing keeping her from using the potty was that she did not want to. The actual potty training stage was about two to three months.

Try not to fight over this too much. This is not a fight you can win. Patience and finding the right motivator is about all you can do.

[lissener]

OK, so friends of mine? Little girl? I’m designated babysitter. So they’re pottytraining, right? Candy. Works.

So then, one day? At the airport? See, they have fambly in Chi-Town, flying there for Christmas. Runnin through the airport, late, cuttin through all the little retail traps, magazines, snowglobes, Skittles, etc. Little One’s gotta go. Gotta get outta line, find a bathroom. Mom’s got infants, dad takes L.O. to find a men’s room, cuz like he’s a man, right? So she’s on the pot, he’s standing over her. She strains. And strains. And stuh–RAYNZ. He goes, L.O., if you can’t go right now, we’ll try again on the plane! She goes, But I want candy!

He tells this story all the time. I have a feeling he’ll tell it at her wedding.

[Aspidistra]

I swore, when I first had a baby that I WOULD NOT ever talk about my kids poo except with other parents, 'cos that’s gross. However, I figure any non-parents still here by this post have pretty much signed away their rights on this issue, so…

Cinnamon, I believe you must be me Or I’m you. Or something. 3 year old girl - check. Wees on potty - check. 4 soon (September in our case) - check. How do you get her to poo on the potty? Buggered if I know - tell me if you ever find out, ok?

Normally I’d probably be with WhyNot on letting her sort it out at her own pace, but in our case I’ve chosen to keep on with this and not back down for three reasons:

1. It was affecting her friendships. She would crap in her nappy, off somewhere playing with her four and five year old friends, both potty trained for years and not give a damn and not notice but THEY would notice and not want to be in the same room as her. And I don’t think she’s really old enough to understand the concept “if everybody goes away when you come in the room it’s because you stink, and if you DIDN’T stink you’d really have a nicer time of it”

2. It’s about a gazillion times easier to clean the crappy pants than the crappy nappy. No really. Because when she’s done it in her pants she TELLS us about it - take 'em off, there it is an a nice round lump, tip it in the toilet and away you go. Whereas in the nappy she’d just sit in it for an hour smearing it into her buttcrack and all down her legs - yech. Plus I was getting really bored with hauling her all the way up to the change table - with the pants, she’s doing all the physical work, I’m just standing round telling her what to do and giving her the occasional wipe.

3. I feel like she didn’t really know, at a gut level, what it was like to be clean and dry all the time - that it was actually nice. How could she? All she’d known all her life was a wet butt about 3/4 of the time (given how much she wees). So I’m giving her the experience of being dry all the time - because even if she wees in her pants sometimes I know she’s done it and can change her, whereas before there was no way of telling - she certainly wouldn’t give us a sign.

So there you have it. I feel like cleaning up a pants poo ever day or so is a small price to pay for not having to haul her off to the change table all the time so I’m happy to keep doing it as long as it takes. We’ve tried a bit of light bribery (she gets to stay up late if she keeps the same pants all day) but it’s not really doing anything and I’m MUCH less stressed than I was when she was a 3 1/2 year old nappy wearer, so it’s all good.

Oh, and FTR, just to throw a spanner in the “its all the fault of disposables” theory - she’s barely worn a disposable in her life. Cloth all the way. Hasn’t made a blind bit of difference. So if you’re starting to think “oh dear, it’s all because we’re decadent 21st century westerners with too much dry-butt technology” - well, that’s one less thing for you to feel guilty about