Well, here’s another update. She did finally go poop in her overnight pullup first thing this morning, so I’m not so worried about that anymore. But she has yet to even try going in the potty.
I’m going to call the pediatrician first thing in the morning and see what she suggests.
That’s good. Holding it is bad.
I’m definitely considering the “just let her have pull-ups and never mention it again” method, but I’ll have to constantly remind my husband (he brings it up with her ALL the time!), and I’ll have to actually muzzle my MIL, who I know blames me because I “won’t *make *her just do it!”
On a brighter side, I’m going to print out this thread and use it to embarrass my daughter when she’s a teenager. “Look, dear! I once discussed the details of your bodily functions with complete strangers on the internet!” Revenge will be mine! 
I used the bribery method of potty training. 5 (FIVE!!!) M&M’s for going pee in the potty. Great happiness, praise and joy by me and prompt dispensing of M&M’s with each successful pee. Once the pattern was well established, and he was going by himself and not always remembering to ask for M’s, I stopped automatically giving them out. I still had them in the house and would give them if he remembered.
For poop, I thought I would up the ante to 10 M&M’s… NO, MOMMY, WANT FIVE!! Obviously not clear enough on the math here! So I substituted a 1/2 piece of GUM! Yeah! Success!
We did bribery with my oldest, too. He was getting close to four and knew the drill, but just wasn’t motivated to actually do it in any consistent way. We did charts, stickers, candy, etc. No dice. Finally, I told him if he went without diapers for 10 days, we’d buy him that really cool bike with flames he’d seen at REI. We had a deal. He still wore overnight pull-ups for a few months, but was diaper-free otherwise.
My youngest didn’t really think things through and only negotiated for a pack of special stickers. He was more self-motivated, though, because he wanted to be a big boy like his brother.
I am going to share my secret with you guys. It has gotten rid of pacifiers, bottles, sleeping in my bed, and pull ups.
For the pull ups, I told my kids that the Pull Up Fairy collects all the pull ups once they were big boys and girls to give to the little babies. We took a large brown folder and decorated the front (oh yes, we made a big thing about this), we wrote letters and drew pictures to the fairy and put the pull ups in the big envelope. We had to set it outside the door and the fairy would pick them up in the middle of the night, and leave a special surprise as a thank you.
I put glitter and a special toy and a thank you letter in the return envelope. My kids never asked for them again because it was so fantastical (kind of like being good for Santa).
The only thing that I ever had a problem with was the thumb sucking, fairies did not work for that.
Hope that it works out for you!
IANA pediatrician, but have you tried pear juice? Most kids like the taste, and it’s pretty good at keeping them regular. (Don’t let your kid drink 3 glasses of it in a row, though!)
After the Firebug was peeing in the potty, but not yet pooping, he got into a cycle where he was only pooping once every 2-3 days, but as a consequence, it was really a lot of work for him to poop when he was finally ready to do so. And since he didn’t yet want to spend serious time on the potty, he wanted to poop in pull-ups so he could go off into a corner and grunt for 20 minutes or so.
Pear juice helped break the cycle. Once he was pooping more often and more easily, he didn’t mind doing it on the potty.
Now we’re at the very last stage of the process: learning to go to the potty when we’re on the road. He has no trouble using the toilet when we’re at home or at someone else’s house, or when he’s at day care. But often when we’re out somewhere, at a restaurant for instance, and he clearly needs to go to the potty, we’ll go into the bathroom, and he’ll just kinda shake his head and go back out. There are some places he has less trouble with than others: the local Trader Joe’s has decorated their bathrooms to have a very homey feel, and he’s used their toilets a number of times now.
I think it’ll help when he’s tall enough to pee into an institutional toilet standing up, but another issue for him is clearly the noise: he really doesn’t like loud, sudden noises, and most institutional toilets these days are quite loud when they flush. I expect he’ll eventually develop a tolerance for it, but it may just take time.
The good news is that he’s had NO accidents on the road since we gave up using daytime pull-ups even for extended outings a couple of months back. Either he’s ultimately been willing to use a potty somewhere, or he’s held it 'til we got home. So I’m definitely counting my blessings.
Another option is to buy special panties with characters on them that she would like, but tell her that they are only for big girls that poop in the potty, and that you don’t think that she’s big enough to get them yet.
This is really what worked for me. I was soooo hard for my husband to keep mum when my son refused to use the toilet, but it had really become a power struggle. It depends heavily on your kid’s temperament, but backing off was the only thing that worked for us. It didn’t matter how much we pushed, what we offered as a bribe - it had to be his idea.
Tell the kid if he/she uses the potty, you’ll give her a cookie. We weren’t having any luck with our efforts, but my father did that and my daughter was potty trained in a day.
Oh, I wish she would be that easy. We’ve offered candy, cookies, toys. We’ve offered trips to the local pizza joint. Stickers. Special character panties. No joy.
Another poop in the pull-up this morning. I have a call into the pediatrician, but she was out today and it will probably be Wednesday until I hear back.
I’m seriously thinking that tomorrow we’re going to go back to pull ups, and just never mention it to her again. She’s obviously not going to budge on the pooping issue, and it’s just turning into a power play. Sigh.
The Boy was very resistant to potty training for reasons I can only guess at. I was beyond frustrated. His preschool teacher gave me some advice (Don’t worry about it, they all end up getting it)…and I wish I could make the face she made when she gave it to me…it was an unconcerned shrug. So I backed off. He did not like swim diapers, yet swam every day…so he wanted to be out of them. He went to preschool again in September and one of the kids said “you wear diapers still?” and he was trained within the week. Perhaps peer pressure isn’t all bad?
apologies for this jumbled post…I am very tired
All I can tell you is how I did it with my daughter (who will be three in a bout a month). We potty trained her about 4 months ago, and it went pretty smoothly, though not without a few hitches.
First, about a month before we began, we told her that she was getting to be a big girl, and that the diapers were going to go away soon. We told her the day they were going away (not that she really understands dates, but it was made clear as we approached). We got a few potty training books that she liked…a Dora the Explorer one, and one with pictures of a real girl on the potty so she got the idea. She liked that one a lot, as it described what happens, how she gets to have big girl underwear, and even describes accidents and that they’re OK as long as you’re trying.
As we approached the day of reckoning, she was actually relatively excited about it. We waited until my wife, who is a teacher, was on Christmas break and started that first Saturday.
My daughter woke up, took off the diaper, and was put into panties. We tried sitting her on the toilet about ever half hour or so, but that quickly became an annoyance to her, so by the end of the day we were just asking if she needed to go. That first day, she had five accidents…all pee. The first two she didn’t even notice and we had to point out that it was running down her leg. That was fun. We had a few ‘I want a diaper!’ screams, but we told her that they were gone, and we only had enough to use a night. However, by the end of the day, she’d gone in the potty 3 or 4 times on her own and only had one accident in the later part of the day. We also bribed her a little…the one book had a ‘star chart’ that she got a sticker every time she went, and big stickers ever 10 times. After 40 times, she was an official ‘big girl’. She loved getting the stickers and putting them on the chart. She also got either two chocolate chips or two mini-marshmallows. (we phased that out after a few days) We used a pull-up at night because we still didn’t think she’d be OK at night for a while.
The next day: 0 accidents and a poop in the potty. She’s been fine ever since. We took the pull-ups away at night within a week, because after she learned to use the potty, she was dry every single night…took that away and she’s wet the bed once in the four months that she has been potty trained, and that was the first month.
She has, of course, had the occcasional accident here and there, but it’s quite rare. I will say that she tried to use poop as a weapon to get out of going somewhere she didn’t want to go that first week. My wife was telling her how she was now big enough to go out places…and we were going to go visit some people. She pooped in her pants twice that day…on purpose, because she didn’t want to go and figured she would show she wasn’t ready to get out of it. My wife caught on quick, asked her point blank if it had anything to do with the visit, and she said yes. My wife said ‘well, you can poop in your pants all you want, but we’re still going.’ That put an end to that.
We did go through a self-induced constipation bout when she had a hard poop early on, and she basically didn’t go poop for about 4 days I believe…talked to her pediatrician and had us note if there were bad signs, and if not, this wasn’t uncommon. Eventually she went again and has been fine since.
Since your daughter is a bit older, I’d say just take the pull-ups away entirely, and if she won’t poop on the potty, just let her poop in her pants. If there are characters on the panties, you may remark “oh no! You pooped on Dora (or whatever)!” If she is defiant about it after a while, make her clean it up (obviously supervise to make sure she doesn’t ruin clothes or get any on herself where you don’t know where it is to clean it off). That should work well quickly, I’d think. May daughter at one point thought it would be funny after she was potty trained for about a month to tell us that she hoped she pooped in her panties because it would be funny. We flat out told her…you do, you’re cleaning it up. She’s never followed through because she knows we’ll do it. We’ve never actually done that for a real accident, but if she does it on purpose, you’d better believe we will (and of course, we would ensure every part of her was well cleaned afterwards).
My son was very reluctant to finally give up his diapers once and for all and wear regular underwear. It was a security thing I believe. He had been wearing those big “underwear” for years and didn’t feel confident in going out in little thin underpants. Peer pressure did the trick in one day. Some older kids were visiting his older brother and they gently pointed out to him that he couldn’t run in the back yard very well in diapers. No prompting from me, they were just nice kids. That was the last day of diapers. It was at that point that I realized how little influence I would have with my children through the years.
I never used Pull Ups with my oldest and have no intention of using them with my youngest. My oldest is almost 8 and he still has a fitted vinyl sheet under his bedding because, hey, accidents happen and mattresses aren’t cheap. When he was night training, I had a big bowl of quarters (apartment living) and every time he messed his bed, he had to help with the laundry. The deal was he could have all the quarters left over once he decided to be a big boy.
You could still try it even if you don’t have coin laundry because it still costs you to wash all those sheets. Deduct a dollar or two from “her money” every time you have to wash her bedding.
I’ve said this before here, but I knew I’d gone to far with bribes.
My daughter loved yellow. And she loved yellow VW Beetles. And one day her brother said to her “Mom will buy you a yellow bug car if you stop using diapers.”
Yeah, I’d gotten so desperate that my son thought buying a three year old a car might be a reasonable bribe.
Although my son did have some success with “pooping for presents.” We bought three or four Thomas the Train engine toys. We hung them on a string over the bathtub. When he pooped in the potty, he got an train car.
It wasn’t sufficient though. He did it once, then spent weeks not doing it. Did it again, then it was a few weeks. He finally decided he was done with diapers when we were about to go to Disney World. And his mother (that’s me) said “oh no you aren’t.” He put on underwear the day after we got home and that was that. (He is about to turn 13).
That’s exactly what my district supervisor told me when he announced that I had been selected to head up the quarterly inspection of our Des Moines plant…
I first misread that as “he was about to turn 13” and it… gave me pause.
I wouldn’t necessarily never mention it again, but perhaps don’t mention it for a couple of weeks.
I was lucky because I stumbled on those things that were really, really important to my son and they were things that he really couldn’t do because of daycare policy until he was potty trained. So, maybe you can make up your own policies.
My daycare’s policies were that if the kids were potty trained, they got to:
Go to the pre-school with the “big kids” (they can’t move up until they’re trained)
Take field trips
Ride in the school bus to take field trips.
So after a particularly frustrating, tearful incident, when we’d both calmed down, I pulled him into my lap and held him and said, “I know you don’t want to use the potty all the time. And that’s okay. If you’re not ready, you’re not ready, and I’m tired of fighting about it. So I’m not asking you again for a while and I’ll leave it up to you to tell me if you’re ready. Here’s what you get if you use it: <list of above>. You can’t do any of this until you poop and pee in the potty all the time. But this has to be your decision. Just know I love you one way or the other.”
That was on a Sunday. He was potty trained by Wednesday. It’s obviously not going to work for everyone, but if you can find your own “policies,” maybe it’s something to try.
What does your son really like or really look forward to about growing up (that’s realistic for him to actually do in the near future)? If you can find out, you can use those as your policies - you can’t do these things until you poop and pee in the potty, but it’s your choice.
The only thing I can really think of that she’s looking forward to, that I can realistically say “no” to, is swimming during this upcoming summer. She’s supposed to start formal lessons, and just loves going to the pool with her cousins in general. It’s a couple of months away, but it might be a good line to draw in the sand. And being a couple of months off, I can give her time to work up to it mentally. Hmm…