Yeah, I know I can google, I have. I’ve had all sorts of advice from people that haven’t potty trained a kid in 40 years.
What I have? A 27 month old daughter. A potty chair. I’ll also add that my daughter is in speech therapy and her language skills are pretty far behind for her age.
What I need? Real, honest to goodness advice on what worked for you. Tips, tricks, torture devices, mops, disinfectants, drugs, books, movies, whatever got you from point A to point B.
From what I understand, she is showing signs of readiness. She will take off her diaper at any available opportunity. She will sit on her potty and say pee pee. But she will not hang out there.
Patience.
A genuine enthusiasm for poop (she had issues with poop).
And M&Ms. One for pee, two for poop. We got the specially-colored holiday sort and called them “potty treats.” They lived in a pretty glass dish on the counter.
A friend of mine that is currently potty-training her 26-month-old twins swears by M&Ms as bribes.
I second the advice to have a lot of patience. Also, I would recommend against forcing your child to sit on the potty when they don’t want to. I tried this with MiniWhatsit and she developed a huge aversion to wanting to sit on the potty at all, and I wound up having to shelve potty training for a month or two as a result.
For both Whatsit Jr. and MiniWhatsit, when we got to a point that I felt that they were just about ready, we switched entirely to underpants during the day. No pull-ups. For both, we had quite a few accidents the first few days, but then they figured it out. MiniWhatsit took longer to stop having accidents than her big brother did, but then she was a full six months younger than he had been, too.
Oh, and one other thing, if she doesn’t seem to like the potty chair, try one of those seat inserts that fits on the adult toilet. Whatsit Jr. loved the potty chair, but MiniWhatsit refused to use it and would only use the “grownup potty” with her little seat insert. Every kid is different.
Admitting this might gross some of you out, but for my fourth child, when we started, we put the potty chair in the living room. Our bathroom was too small for a potty chair.
Reading this, it sounds awful – the poor kid peeing without privacy, but what one-year-old cares about privacy anyway?
He was the quickest and easiest to train. The other three were easy too – none of them were in diapers after about 18 months. No bribes, and of course no punishment. I think they just liked being dry. I spent a fortune on training pants. No disposables in those days. Maybe that helped – wetting through cotton pants is probably more uncomfortable than wetting in a disposable trainer.
Once Upon a Potty is a good read. For you, that is :lol:. Your dd probably won’t care.
One thing that honestly did help with mine – besides them just getting older – was letting my twins run around naked in our messy room (which has a linoleum floor). Whenever I saw one of them starting to dribble, I grabbed 'em quick and set 'em on the little potty chair. I didn’t have the stamina to really keep that up, it was just something we did from time to time.
They also liked being the ones to pour the pee into the big potty, although I think that scares some children. I also tried to make the bathroom more inviting by leaving the light on all the time, and by decorating the wall with some of their artwork.
IIRC, it seems like they were occasional potty users for 6 months or so, and then finally got the hang of it at around 3 yrs 4 months. However, the good news is they were dry all night shortly thereafter.
Time, patience, sense of humor and realize that she may become trained for one function but not the other (I had a friend whose child would pee in the potty–not wet at night etc, but insisted on a diaper to poop for about 2-3 months).
Let her see you using your potty. Model washing hands etc. Talk about it and read some books (her level, not yours!). We liked My New Potty by Joanna Cole-all 3 of my kids liked her book)My New Potty My kids were trained at 27 months (oldest, girl), 29 months (#1 son) and about 31 months (#2 son). Pull ups tended to confuse them, but they also liked them.
The other books mentioned are also good. She may well be taking off her diaper just because she now can. Does she know the words for potty? We said “peeps” and “poops”, obviously, you can say whatever you like (don’t make it too weird or her future preschool etc might have trouble!).
Good luck. It will happen, perhaps sooner than you think (it’s kind of a counterintuitive kind of thing–the more you struggle with it, the harder it is. Go with- er, the flow).
I’ve lived through training 3 toddlers. Number 1 was trained by my mother-in-law when she was 2 and a half. MIL was staying with me while I was extremely pregnant with my second child and, frankly, was bored. We got a book out of the library “How to potty train in one day” (Not exactly the title but close enough) and she followed the steps. Sure enough - in one day she was trained. But she had lots of accidents and needed a diaper at night for several months.
The other two basically trained themselves. Both were 3 years old. Number two told me that she didn’t want to wear diapers anymore. I told her that she’d need to use a potty if she didn’t have a diaper. She said fine and that was that. No accidents, dry through the night. Number three was told in the summer after he turned 3 in May that he had to be toilet trained before Montessouri started in September or else a teacher would change his diaper. That was motivation enough and, like #2, trained himself overnight with no accidents.
Long story short — don’t worry about this until your child is 4 years of age. Chances are, she’ll be self-trained prior to that.
One thing that helped with our daughter when she was the same age (or even younger, I think) was to ask if she wanted to sit on the potty while she was naked and we were filling the bathtub. The sound of running water seemed to help her “cut loose,” and she enjoyed the praise she got for doing it. She was fully day-trained a little before she turned 3 (including naps).
She is in bed wearing panties for the fourth night in a row right now. She’d been wearing nighttime pullups, and we weren’t making a big deal of it, then one night she announced that she wanted to wear panties and keep them dry all night (“I’m a big girl now!”). She made it the first two nights and had an accident on the third. We’ll see how it goes tonight. But it’s totally her idea, and I expect it to be a fairly smooth transition. We’re just making sure we always have at least one set of clean sheets on hand during the transition period. She will be 4 in March.
ENugent: You can have your kid in the bathroom with the tub running and they didn’t dive head first into the tub? Wow.
Heard on the M&M’s. Any ideas how to keep Daddy out of them? It’s not like HE needs a reward.
From what ya’ll have said, it seems she’s just getting to the age where we should give it a try. I got her “Potty Time with Elmo” but bless her, she doesn’t like him very much. I know the Big Girl thing would work, but she’s not quite hip to that idea yet. Maybe I’ll work on that a bit.
I’m a pretty laid back Mom and I certainly don’t want the house to get all stressed out about it and god knows, she’s an opinionated little non-talker. I’m ok with slow and easy.
Since disposable diapers feel so dry, I’m not sure toddlers can really feel what’s going on so either find some wet-feel diapers or put her in training pants for whole days. If you already use cloth she should already know the signals. Training pants in plastic pants will keep things in the house dry.
With both my sons I waited until they were three, told them three year old’s don’t wear diapers anymore except at night and that was it. Both took two days. I learned that trick from my mother who had 4 children, the first three within 29 months.
