Potty Training 1: What I Did

Note to self: When using auto-post, make sure you click 6 a.m. instead of 6 p.m. Sorry for the delay on this post.

As I said in the previous post, I used a communication approach to potty training. Which was really the only reasonable approach, since we started way earlier than most people do nowadays, and certainly long before the magical 27-month mark some experts say is the earliest a child can control his or her bladder. To understand why I though the 27-month-mark was full of it, you have to understand one of the principles behind elimination communication (which I've never done, BTW): The idea is that babies are born with the ability to let you know when they need to eliminate, the same way they let you know when they need to eat. If you start paying attention and letting them go when they need to or changing their diapers right away, it forms a feedback loop and the older they get the more obviously they signal that they need to go (just like they signal more obviously that they need to eat as they get older). In essence, when we put diapers on our babies and ignore their signals that they need to go, we train them just to go in the diapers whenever (diaper-training, instead of potty-training, as it were).

This totally made sense to me. In some cultures they just follow the kid's signals until eventually the kid can go on his own and doesn't need to signal anymore, so they don't even have a concept of potty-training. So I reasoned that if you start working on gettting a kid to pay attention to the body's signals about when it needs to eliminate, a kid could get back the ability to signal long before the 27-month mark.

And this is where I started--trying to get El Chico to pay attention to what his body felt like so he could eventually tell me before anything happened.

When he was 16 months he started getting extremely interested in all things toilet. He wanted to come in with us while we went, and he started really trying to look at his diaper as I changed it, etc. We were visiting my mom and she wondered why not just buy him a potty? So she bought him two (one for his room and one for the living room) of the one-piece Baby Bjorn little potties. (I think these are a great choice for kids who are still kind of small, as they can easily sit down on them. They're also one piece which means you can get them completely clean every time, with no cracks or crevices.) It was summer, so we followed my grandmother's advice and just took off his pants outside all the time. He watered my mom's lawn a few times (and was fascinated to watch it come out) and fertilized it a few times. But once it happened a few times he really started to get that he pooped and peed, too.

After that it was all about talking talking talking and watching. We watched our cat go in her box (and talked about it). We stopped to watch dogs on the street go (and talked about it). He became our bathroom attendant, standing there holding the toilet paper for us and spraying us with cologne and asking us what we were doing. We read books about it. We watched DVDs about it. (If you only get one toilet-related video, get the Bear in the Big Blue House one. No video is going to teach your kid to use the potty by itself, so you might as well pick one you like. The songs are funny and it won't drive you nuts if your kid wants to watch it a million times.) We talked about it as we changed his diaper and in the tub and at dinner. It became as important to him as construction and dump trucks and fire engine and tools.

Winter came and went, and when the weather started to get warm enough, I took his pants off at home. I'd take them off in the morning, and not put them on again until we went out. The first few days he peed a couple of times on the kitchen floor. But after that he'd start to run to one of the potties and pee in them. Some days it was one hour diaperless, and some days it was a few hours with no pants. He really thought it was fun to go in the potty.

After a few months I decided to press my luck and take off his pants before his morning poop. The first day he looked at me and said "I have to poop!" with some alarm. I casually asked, "Why not sit on your potty and do it?" He tried it (I think because I didn't seem invested in it) and it worked. After a few days that became part of our routine, too.

After awhile we started putting on underpants (we used the Gerber lined ones, as everyone we know told us Pull-Ups were a huge rip-off and would actually delay training) and going on short excursions outside. We'd pee before and as soon as we came back into the house. The first day it was 5 minutes, then 10 minutes, then 15 minutes.

I would have continued this plan indefinitely (increasing the times we were out gradually), but we had to travel to see my grandmother in another state. The day we were supposed to levae, El Chico refused to put on a diaper for the trip. So I put him in the one pair of training pants I had that was waterproof, and hoped for the best. He told us when he had to go, and stayed dry through a taxi ride, a short flight, a 90-minute layover, a longer flght, and a two-hour car ride. He had just decided this was it. Over the next few weeks he had plenty of accidents, but he was essentially trained.

I guess I could summarize what we did:

1. There was very little pressure. I followed his lead and backed off if it seemed to fast for him.
2. I didn't believe people who said, "Oh, he's interested now but he'll stop being interested in a few weeks." He hadn't stopped being interested in construction vehicles, so why would he stop being interested in poop?
3. We had fun. When you accept that you may have to wipe up some pee every once in awhile, the whole thing becomes kind of a game.
4. It was all about his mastery of the signals of his body, not a timetable, although obviously I was hoping he'd be done with diapers soon than later. I just tried not to communicate that to him.
5. We tried not to get too excited when he did go in the potty or toilet. Sometimes too much praise can be its own kind of pressure.
6. My husband was unemployed and home for a lot of this time, so they got to do "boys pee together" routines an awful lot for reinforcement. I think it helped it click for El Chico.

You'll notice that it took a full year from when we started (16 months) to when he was in underpants all day (28 months). I'm sure it would have gone sooner if we'd started later or if I'd really pushed. As it was, he was still trained months earlier than any of the other boys his age, and all but two of the girls we knew.

Questions? Suggestions? Doubts? Unrelated thoughts? What's another potty-training method we shoudl talk about?

Comments

[Jen (yup, another one)]

I guess my one thought is, I can't see how to make this work if you work outside the home. Any thoughts on that?

[Moxie]

It would depend on your childcare situation. If you had a nanny or in-home childcare it'd be fine, because you'd just have to get the caregiver on the same page about leaving the pants off for a few hours at a time. (You'd do all the bathroom talk and early prep while you were home in the evening and on weekends before you started the pants-free time.) You could still do all the talk and pants-free time on weekends if you use insitutional daycare. Lots of daycare centers have their own policies on potty-training (some start at 18 months or 2 years, for example), so you'd just have to coordinate with them.

[P]

I didn't potty-train my son at all. When he was 2.5 we bought some underwear but when I asked him if he wanted to wear them he said no. Fast forward to a month after his 3rd birthday. He woke up, asked to wear his underwear and we never looked back. He never had one accident. That's what I'm planning on doing with #2. He'll be 3 at the end of March. He knows he has underwear ready for him. He has pee'd in the potty a few times but insists he still wants diapers. He'll come around. :)

[Jen (yup, another one)]

It would be out-of-the-house daycare, but I don't yet know exactly what setting (daycare in someone else's home or institutional). I had thought of essentially doing it part time as you suggest, but thought the inconsistency might derail the project. I teach, so I am quite aware that kids can maintain disparate rule sets for different environments... but at 18-24 months? I teach older kids, so don't know about that. What do you think?

[Sarah]

I guess I ahve never thought of how we trained my daughter. We had a time rpessure--she had to to be fully trained within 6 days of her third birthday to start school. So when she was about 2, we started. It was slow, low pressure, lots of naked time. And we were so close when her baby brother was born. That derailed us for a month or two. But by ~27 months she was completely done. And I thought I was late, but now that I know more parents and little brothers, we seem to have been early.

[Cat, Galloping]

I'm just wondering, after all that talk about poop and pee during the training process, how do you get them to *stop* talking about it and *stop* wanting to watch you go? Because I am picturing some very awkward situations!

[Nopenname]

I had everyone tell me to try and just start putting my daughter on the potty every 30 minutes. She had never before said the word diaper until we started trying that.

So we just backed off and didn't talk about it. Sorta had videos and books for her to look at if she wanted too. And her daddy, unbeknownst to me, did a little bit of "psychological warfare". He put her to bed every night and when he'd go change her diaper for the evening he'd talk to her about how diapers are yucky because they hold the pee and poo in them near your privates, and how going in the potty is much better.

Well one morning about two weeks before her second birthday she told me "I don't wear diaper" I asked her where she was going to go to pee then, and she said "Toilet" (like DUH Mom!) and I mean she had accidents but in a week she was fully potty trained day and night and would tell us when she needed to go.

I tell everyone now that I don't believe so much in "Potty Training" It's not like a cat or dog where you can actually get them used to a routine and where they NEED to go to the bathroom. And rather a kid will do it roughly when they are ready to.

[Moxie]

P, boy are you brave to live on the edge! Hee.

Cat, since you have a boy the poop talk will continue until he's at least 14, from what I hear. Once we knew El C knew what we meant when we said we were pooping, we started asking him to leave the bathroom so we could have "a little privacy." After a few tries he was fine with that, and he asks for "a little privacy" if he's pooping, too. Peeing is not as big a deal for us, although I've sometimes asked for a little privacy then just to have a couple of seconds by myself.

[-Blue]

I use a method similar to yours, I think. We don't make a point of talking about elemination, though. It just comes naturally at about 18 months and we're just as open about it as anything else: we talk, they come in the bathroom, etc.

I also start mine a tad later (2yrs, 1 or 2 mos) and we do it all at once. One day everything below the waist comes off and we go for it, lol! One difference in my method is that the child must help clean up all messes. There's no scolding, just matter-of-fact, 'oops, you had an accident, let me get you something to clean up with" and we talk about how we should go in the pot, etc.

My son was completely dry during the day after a week and dry at night a week and a half later. My daughter took a bit longer: 3 1/2 weeks total.

Of course I have the advantage of being home with mine. I really like the done-in-a-few-weeks thing. I would go mad having it drag out for months.

I'm getting ready to do my third child and I hope it's as stress-free and quick as the first two!
LOL, we'll see!

-Blue