On thanksgiving Day my brother told me a story of how a few weeks ago a neighbor came over and asked him and his wife to babysit for a few hours while the neighbor went to a funeral. The kid (a boy) turns 4 in April. When the neighbor dropped him off, they included a supply of diapers.:eek:
And sure enough, the kid took a dump in his drawers while they were watching him.
When the neighbor picked him up, my brother inquired as to why a child that’s over 43 months old isn’t toilet trained. This made the neighbor slightly pissy and she made some comments about how he [the child] “hasn’t decided to be potty trained yet”. I just shook my head when he told me this. My brother has 3 kids, all girls, I have 3 kids, 2 boys and a girl. All of our kids were potty trained well before they were 3 years old. But our kids are all adults now. Have times and attitudes changed so much that we’ve lost touch with this issue?
I say a 43 month old of otherwise average intelligence should not still be crapping in his drawers. This sounds like lazy parenting to me. or am I wrong?
I don’t know about lazy parenting, but it certainly prevalent, for some reason.
I am sorry to have to admit it is also rampant in my own family
My daughter somehow managed to train her oldest daughter to use her nappy (Australian for diaper) instead of the toilet, so at 4 she was running around with no nappy but insisting on having one put on so she could go to the toilet in it, then insisting it be taken off. Me - I would have left her in the damned thing - but somehow she managed to get her to use the toilet before preschool.
Now my oldest son’s daughter is also still in nappies, and she is 4 in March. However although he only has every second weekend access he is making an attempt to put things right - but she is going the opposite way, wailing to go to the toilet every 5 minutes and keeping him in the parent/child toilet at a shopping centre for 40 minutes last time he had access, while she “tried” to go to the toilet.
I have a theory that it is disposable nappies that are behind this phenomenon - put the kid in good old fashioned towelling nappies and see how quickly parents and child take to the toilet training process when they have to wash or wear the stinky uncomfortable things.
In the absence of other factors I would agree that it sounds like laziness. I also agree that this late training is common nowadays. Personally, I blame it on the pullups. My mom did home daycare for years and she started seeing the late trainers right about the same time the pullups – which combine the convenience of diapers (just go right in them) with the convenience of underpants (the kids can put them on themselves) – came on the market. And, at least in her experience, the parents tend to be the culprits. It was common for Mom to work hard all week getting a kid to use the potty, then get them back after the weekend completely untrained – the parents had taken the kids out and about on the weekend and “it was easier” to put them back in pullups. Many of her kids weren’t trained until after 4 years old and one girl was still wearing pullups on her 5th birthday – she was barely trained in time to start kindergarden. And most of these parents were heard to utter the excuse “He/she isn’t ready yet.” Apparently with a straight face!
My now-17 year old son was fully potty-trained by shortly before his 3rd birthday. My now-16 year old daughter wasn’t trained until shortly after her 4th birthday (and she was still having fairly frequent accidents until age 8) – but she has Cerebral Palsy, so that isn’t surprising in her case.
I was stubborn and didn’t finish training until I was past three, but I’m sure that wasn’t due to a lack of effort on my mom’s part. It is true that some kids simply aren’t ready until two and a half or three, but FOUR?
The pull-up type things do have one good use; my brother had a problem with bedwetting until he was eightish and his bladder caught up with the rest of him, and they saved us washing a lot of sheets.
Wow. All I can hope is that one day I’ll be as great a parent as you all.
Maybe these parents are lazy, but maybe not. Your brother sure is a busybody for asking such a question. And I hope he didn’t p[hrase it the same way you did. I would have been a little more than “prissy” in that situation. Sounds like he isn’t a regular babysitter and this was an emergency situation, and it’s unfortunate that they had to deal with cleaning up the kid’s crap, no one likes that kind of job. But the kid’s potty training schedule is none of his business.
See, I’m one of the “lazy” parents y’all are disparaging. My son will 4 in 4 weeks and he’s mostly potty trained and he till wears a diaper at bed time, just in case. And he has the odd accident in his pants, no. 1 and 2. My wife tried a couple times over the past year to potty train him and it just didn’t take. He had huge fits. He cried and screamed. It was difficult, and so we let him off. And just what is the harm? How are we scarring him by letting him do this at his own pace? Now he runs to the bathroom on his own and usually only hollers when he needs a wipe. Yeah, he has the odd accident, but they are getting more rare, we express our disappointment and ask that he do better next time.
Pull-ups just might be a factor, we tried that for a while and then abandoned it cause it gave little incentive for him to use the potty.
Does that make us lazy? Certainly not. I think pushing a kid to get potty trained makes you all selfish and insensitive. It makes life much easier and less expensive for us parents, but what does it do for the kid? When he starts school he’ll be using the potty just like everyone else. Get over it.
You wouldn’t judge most people on age alone, so why do you do it in a case like this? Two people of the same age aren’t necessarily equal in terms of maturity or equal in a host of other ways. This applies to people aged three, four, 10, 18, 21, or 81.
Actually, my peditrician said not to even bother until three. If they do it before three and show readiness, great. If not, no reason to worry. The advice on this has really changed.
Both my kids were late potty trainers. Not due to laziness on my part. In the case of my son, he is a tentative kid. He usually doesn’t attempt anything until he is pretty confident of success. So once he trained at 3 1/2, no accidents (he still wears a pull up at night). He had some issues about being afraid of the toilet he had to work through as well.
My daughter is stubborn and has a baby fetish. We tried EVERYTHING after she turned three short of beating her. Stickers. Timers. Letting her run around naked. It had become a power struggle and a refusal for her to grow up. She finally had a talk with the peditrician and we were told to put her back into diapers (not pullups, not training pants, not all the other stuff we’d tried to transition her) and let her decide. She did, about two weeks later.
One of the mom’s at daycare is the most type A person I know. Not at all lazy when it comes to her children (or her house or her job or anything she does). Her daughter trained at four and a half. She blames daycare (although other kids at daycare trained at two, I suspect the little girl was in a power struggle with mom).
If your kids potty trained early and easily, be grateful that the potty gods were smiling on you. But don’t assume that other parents are lazy.
But I’d love some advice just in case I ever have a third child. What do you suggest be done with a child who is going on four and doesn’t respond to stickers? Doesn’t respond to ten minutes on the potty every half hour? Leaves puddles (and worse) when you try the naked approach? Thinks heaven is sitting in wet and/or soiled training pants?
Who gives a crap if they are “lazy” about this? I say this as an avowedly lazy parent when it came to potty training. My son wasn’t fully trained until well after three. Maybe he could’ve been trained earlier if we were less “lazy.”
But I can tell you that our doctor (father of three, doctor to hundreds of kids) wasn’t particularly worried, and neither was our daycare provider (degree in child development, mother of two, in the business for 30 years).
More important, to me, is whether a parent is “lazy” about installing the child seat. Or providing balanced meals. Or offering stimulating, safe, age-appropriate activities. Compared to these, whether a kid trains at 24 months of 48 months seems like a small issue. Certainly not one that a neighbor should make pejorative comments about.
Rod told me that they sat for this kid for about 2 1/2 hours and he found the kid to be bright and talkative. Then, all of a sudden, he just got quiet and was starring at my sister in law. “What’s the matter?”, she asked. “I’m pooping” was the reply. If he knows what he’s doing and is consciously doing it, shouldn’t he be trained to go into the bathroom?
What happens when they want to put him into 4 year old kindergarten?
As for my brother being a busy body, I think he tried to phrase it something like "Why doesn’t such a big boy use the potty’ or something. He only told this story because he was pissed about having to clean up someone elses kid.
My daughter was trained at 14 months, my 2 boys by 26 months.
3 1/2 just seems kind of old to me, and I’m wondering why the attitude on this has changed.
From what I’ve read it seems that part of the reason is about letting the child make the decision. But children show signs of being ready usually by 2 or so. I think parents are being lazy by not following through.
I don’t really feel myself in a position to comment on this, but maybe it would be OK to ask something that I, as a SAHM, have always wondered: how in the world do you potty-train a kid who is in daycare? Does the center have a sort of program, and the parents are expected to make an effort to support it at home? Does the center try to accommodate the parents’ style? What if you can only afford a pretty mediocre place, and they don’t make much effort at all?
Bolding mine. My son was nowhere near ready at two, and we tried shortly after he turned three with no luck, as I mentioned. And calling parents lazy doesn’t leave any room for things like this.
pkbites, your brother’s experience was obviously unpleasant for him, and perhaps this child’s parents could be more assertive with the potty training, but calling all parents whose kids are not trained by some arbitrary age lazy is presumptuous on your part. So chill out and tell your brother to decline babysitting until the kid’s potty trained.
The key question raised here is “what motivates a kid to want to be potty trained?”
If a kid wears those pullups there is no “consequence” for going in his pants. Someone’s earlier post brought up that fact.
Last summer, on our pediatrician’s recommendation, we switched our son to underwear during the day. He loved the comfort. But at night we had put him in pullups (for bed protection).
NOTE: Kids rarely crap in their sleep. No cite but other parents in our neighborhood have noted this as well.
At that point he took it upon himself to let us know he had to go potty. We would assist him (get him to the john etc.) We then tested the waters by letting him sleep in underwear.
That put him on a fast-track to training. By fall he was fully trained.
Folks, it’s called potty “training” for a reason.
You have to put in the time (and my wife and I both work full-time).
Do you have some data on this? What do you mean by “usually?”
Dangermom, in our case, our daycare provider just started the training as she usually did it, and let us know what worked for her in regards to our son. Our son was greatly influenced by the other children in her care, so we couldn’t duplicate that at home (he’s an only child). I didn’t ask her for a lot of advice on methods; instead I got some from other parents. Her main advice was not to push and not to freak; she never knew any kid who started college in diapers.
In our present daycare situation (a center), my son is in with kids who are trained and kids who aren’t. They have set times when they ask all the children to use the toilet, and I think this sort of ‘scheduling’ is helpful. Not sure what sorts of training methods they use since we’re past that now.
The kid turns 4 in April. That means he is 3 and a half. Maybe a bit late by some people’s standards but not at all what I’d call abnormal. If the kid, say, isn’t potty trained by the time he hits 4, maybe that’s cause for concern. A mere month in a toddler’s life brings huge changes in development sometimes.
And IMHO unless a kid is just raring to go potty like a big boy/girl (and some are, definitely), I kinda have to raise an eyebrow about training a kid well before they hit 3. A couple of months before, sure. But before then and I’m wondering if it’s Mommy and Daddy’s accomplishment instead of the kid’s. I have a friend who has been working on her kid since before she even turned 2. She’s about 2 and a half now and pees sometimes but I personally think she’s a bit too hyper and should just chill out and let the kid go at her own pace. So far the kid isn’t in therapy over it, though
We trained Lil Snoopy by putting her in “big girl panties” during the day. If she peed, she had to live with it for a few minutes, which was uncomfortable. She learned really quick when she needed to pee and where to go to do her thing. Much praise and merriment followed every time she went to the big girl potty. At night we put her in diapers but once she was regularly going through the night dry, we stopped. She was fully trained by, oh, September this year (she turned 3 in July).
Just wanted to mention that my kid didn’t get potty-trained until after 3, and even then it was a struggle at first – the moment you plopped him on the potty, he would howl and scream like he was being tortured or something. Of course, now he announces every potty trip in a loud yell, so he’s over that.
As SnoopyFan points out, the kid in question is 3-and-a-half; not being potty trained at that age might be slightly unusual, but not a parenting crime IMO.
What I’ve learned is that potty training in the first world and the third world seem to be completely different. My wife, from the Caribbean, was potty trained at 6 months, and her brother was a slower learner, potty trained at 1.5 years. My kids right now were semi-potty trained (only urinating in their diapers) by 9 months old. This is quite normal for most of the world. Personally, I think it’s a great thing to potty train this early. Of course, this kind of thing is a process - it still will be a long time untl they go to the bathroom on their own, but at least they don’t poop in their diapers anymore.
That’s right. Take all the credit for easy potty training. My cousin learned this the hard way. First child - a boy (they train late you know) trained by a year. Second child, eighteen months. My cousin was stellar. She was incredible. Mom of the Year. She knew how to potty train children and was an expert. Could have written books.
Then the potty karma caught up to her. Her third child (a girl) was 3 1/2 before she trained. And was a shit smearer for six months (poop in the diaper - smear on the walls). That third little darling is EEEEVIL - in more ways than just potty training. Making up for the two little angels that proved what a great parent she was.
But I’d still like you to suggest something I didn’t try with my daughter that would have worked. Because, as I said, short of beating her, we tried darn near everything and I think I read six books on how to potty train your child (and we have a full collection of children’s potty books as well, and videotapes). (My favorite motivational tool was Peeing for Prizes - didn’t work though. I knew I’d gone too far when my four year old looked at his sister - who was admiring a yellow VW Beetle and said “if you potty train, Mommy will buy you a yellow bug car”).
I laugh as I and my girlfriends have discovered how different our children are. One thought I was nuts for some behavior I had with one of my kids - then she had one who needed the same behavior (can’t remember what it is, maybe lying down with your kids for a few minutes to get them to sleep?). One was shocked that all our children didn’t speak in full sentences by fourteen months (it was the breastfeeding and attachment parenting, she told everyone). Her second is two and doesn’t talk much at all. (Tests OK, not great, but not intervention territory).
On the daycare front, my daycare uses a variety of different methods depending on how the child responds. Scheduled potty breaks are part of the program from two on. Plus rewards for putting something in (tootsie rolls were a favorite, stickers for the candyless kids). Peer pressure sometimes does wonders (didn’t for my daughter).
Heh heh. Ain’t that how it always goes? I’m fully expecting to get a devil-child next time, because the two I’ve got are just a little too easy for comfort. I try not to get too smug, because I know quite well that it isn’t me, perfect mom that I am–something really nasty is lying in wait for me, that’s all.
