Heh, Eva, IN a week, not AT a week. 
Okay, I can answer this question.
Setting aside the very real concern that caging your child would constitute child abuse, this will never work with humans. We’re not denning animals, and have no compulsion to keep our immediate area clean. This has to be taught to us from a very early age, but can be quickly reversed by repeated and prolonged exposure to our own wastes. The only reason it’s marginally easier to potty-train a child than it is to house-train a dog is that you can use language with the child. I have heard horror stories from friends with little kids about their children smearing poop on walls and bedding, eating poop, throwing poop, etc. Humans are not born thinking “Eww, poop!”, whereas dogs seem to be. I have my own theories on why this might be, but here is probably not the place.
Possibly amusing story concerning my own potty training: My mom loves to bring this up at the most inopportune moments. We always had dogs growing up, and by the time I was 2 years old, I somehow got the idea that, like the dogs, I was supposed to go outside on the lawn to do my business. Convincing me otherwise took the best part of a year. We actually have a picture of me, at about age 2, standing in front of the back door doing the pee-pee dance, waiting impatiently to be let out so I could pee.
AdoptaSon was 3 when we started encouraging him to use the potty. He didn’t give a flying flip and happily peed in the toilet. Poop? Forget it … it was his and he was hanging onto it as long as humanly possible. It got to the point where my DH noticed son did the “kimshee squat” whenever he needed to poop, so DH would wisk him off to the toilet. He would hand him a book and tell him not to get up until he made a big splash. I think we scarred this kids, honest. He’s 11 now and still waits until the last possible moment before he goes.
Adoptadaughter, the youngest of our brood, was 2 when we started training above son. We watched her watching our son pee, could see the little wheels turning in her head … and off she went to the toilet where she proceeded to pee standing up like her brother :rolleyes: She had pretty good aim, too! We made sure she spent some quality time with the gals in the house to show her we sit, and within a weeks time she trained herself completely.
Good luck
My kid is like Dangerosa’s daughter. Stickers don’t interest him that much. He doesn’t like candy. He doesn’t care about his big boy underpants. He says he wants to be a baby. He loves to pee on the floor if given the chance.
My daycare provider uses a permanent marker to put stars on his pull-up when he keeps them dry. He seems to like that. We’ve also told him we’re going to get him a lego train when he starts beign consistent. But he just doesn’t care that much. Little devil. He’s 3 1/2. I really hope he’s not using pull-ups at 4.
OK, thanks everyone for the suggestions. For informational purposes, you may like to know that we mainly use cloth diapers, and so her training pants (“diaper panties”) are basically thick unisex underwear. She hates being wet or poopy, and she can hold her bladder for hours–has in fact stayed dry all night for a few days now.
So today I implemented two strategies–once she had pooped, I put her into real panties, which she liked a lot. (It had been 2 days since her last poop, so I was worried about what was coming down the pipe.) She has stayed dry for 2 days now, so I was pretty confident about that.
I also bought a bag of Valentine M&Ms and put some in a Tupperware bowl in the bathroom. These are ‘potty treats.’ She gets one for peeing, two for pooping. This is a big hit–she has talked about it all day. Hopefully, there is enough in the bowl to cover getting her trained, and then they’ll be gone, and there won’t be any more pink M&Ms in the store, either. The result was that she asked to go potty most of the time, but also tried to get away with going every 5 minutes.
So we shall see. Thanks everybody.