SmithWife waited till both our kids were a little older before potty training them, and didn’t have any trouble at all. My son was quicker/easier to housebreak than my daughter, but in general it was worth the disadvantages of waiting.
Perhaps you could wait a couple months and try again?
Not to throw a monkey wrench in this whole thing here, but I just have to tell this story. I am a nanny for a terrific little girl, I started before she was 1 year old, and she just turned 6. (I have a son, my pride and joy, but he is all big and has tattoos and piercings.)
One day, when she was about 4, I took my little friend to a really good park near the Berkeley Marina. We met a very nice mommy and her baby boy, he was too little to walk or talk yet – just crawling in the sandbox. He wore no diaper. After awhile, Mommy lifted him out of the sandbox, pulled down his pants, held him up over the grass off to the side — and whistled! He immediately began to pee.
My jaw just dropped, I was literally dumbstruck. I know I eventually asked her how the hell she did that, but I must have been too stunned to remember what she said. Conditioning, I guess. But wow.
Sounds like Elimination Communication. I use that with my baby, but I also use diapers for backup.
Wow again. That is so cool! I breastfed my son, and carried him in a sling, and I’m pretty sure we’re closer because of it, in part. Sounds like this is another thing sort of like that.
We did breastfeeding/sling-wearing/etc but “elimination communication” was a step too far for me. If it works for people, that’s cool, though.
Re the idea of taking away swimming lessons as a consequence, I would probably not do that. In my experience, kids at this age need instant and immediate consequences in order to make the association between the behavior and the consequence. To a 4-year-old, a month might as well be ten thousand years in terms of how real and immediate it feels.
If you want to do reward/consequence, I’d probably set something up with a small treat (M&Ms or whatever) and lots of praise for successful pottying, and having to help clean up for, um, unsuccessful pottying. Although, you know, obviously don’t harsh out on the kid or shame them or whatever. Just, “let’s clean this up together.”
It’s OK to wait too, of course.
My sister is doing elimination communication with her 6 month old baby boy. She started a few weeks ago, and though he does wear diapers for backup, about 90% of the time he pees and poops in the potty.
Get rid of the pull-ups. I really don’t have a lot of good things to say about pullups. They are like diapers the kids can take off by themselves, but big-boy/big-girl pants are better. We had like one accident after getting rid of the pullups.
As someone who has showed up to the pool with my kids only to find the pool was closed for 24 hours because somebody’s kid took a dump in it…I am all for cancelling swimming lessons until she’s trained. Think of it as prevention, not punishment.
Usually non-potty-trained kids wear swim diapers in the pool, which are specifically designed to keep kids’ dumps from contaminating the swimming pool.
They have those? The modern world keeps getting cooler! Errr, except for the parts that really, really suck.
Hmmm, my maternal parent also reported success using M&Ms. I’ve noticed several mentions of them in this thread. I find it really charming that the little ones are happy with 3 or 4 of them. 
I think I’m really using it more as a break for both of us. I’m just tired of trying right now, and I’m sure that as much as I’ve tried to keep it low-key, my daughter has perceived that this is something her Dad and I really want her to do, which gives her the power in the situation.
We’ve tried the treats and the high praise, etc., but none of it works. The fact is, she doesn’t want to go poop in the potty more than she wants any M&Ms or toys or whatever. That’s the hurdle we need to get over.
I bought her some pull-ups, and told her that it was up to her to decide when she wanted to be a big girl and start going potty, and that I wasn’t going to ask her about it any more. I did briefly mention the swimming thing, just to put it out there, but I didn’t harp on it. For now, we are just maintaining our silence. I think this summer, when we’re driving by the pool every day, it will be a more immediate consequence. Especially if she’s having to hear about her cousins going without her.
And FWIW, I’m not really worried about her pooping in the pool…girl is perfectly capable of holding it. Unfortunately, that’s part of the problem!
I’ve never had much patience for half-measures, so when we decided it was time to potty train our son at a little over three years old, we just did. Spent a couple of days explaining what was going to happen, then just put him in underpants and had done with it. I was sort of expecting the worst, since he’d never given the slightest indication up to that point that he ever noticed when he was peeing or going poop. Honestly if we’d waited until he was showing the signs of readiness that people talk about, we’d probably still be waiting. (He’s a year older now.)
Anyway, pee took four days, then he had it. Poop took almost two months. Yay, lucky us! He just did not want to go, not on the potty, not in a diaper (we continued to use them for nights and on trips outside the house for a little while), not anywhere. It was like once he became consciously aware of what his body was doing, he wanted no part of it. We’d sit him on the potty and he’d just cry, asking us to help him go but unable or unwilling to actually make it happen himself. We were lucky he never became truly constipated (eventually he would just be unable to hold it, and would go where-ever he happened to be at the time), but it was a lot of poops in the underpants. A lot. It was miserable for everybody.
At at that, if I had it to do all over again I don’t think I’d do anything differently. I think it was just something that he (and as a result we) had to go through. Eventually he got it. Given another year or two I might even get over the trauma.
Umm, good luck.
My daughter had exactly the same problem as the OP, at exactly the same age. We tried everything to get her to poop in the potty, with no luck at all. And this is in Thailand, where most children are potty trained by like 1 year old. It’s nutty.
What finally worked was a specific form of bribery, one that she sort of fell into herself. We had just gotten some princess dresses from the USA, and had planned to give her one each month. She knew about them, though, and was really excited to wear her Cinderella dress. One day I mentioned after an extremely exhausting few weeks of intense potty training that I might let her wear the Cinderella dress.
I was going to say something like “If you sit on the potty” because that would have been a major victory. Poor girl had seen the doctor to get help pooping once already at this point. But she finished my sentence for me with “If I poop?” And I just smiled and said yes.
I stood in the doorway of the bathroom for a solid 45 mins making the dress dance and sing to her. It worked! We have had no problems since.