What Are Your Best Tips for Potty Training?
This post may contain affiliate links and CorporetteMoms may earn commissions for purchases made through links in this post. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.
I’ve shared my own tips for potty training (and how I royally screwed it up with my first child!), but I know it’s a frequent topic of conversation among the commenters. So let’s discuss: What ARE your best tips? What things did you try; what were your biggest challenges? Did anyone have an Especially Difficult Time — for example, I know one parent who was advised to give her child not one, not two, but THREE enemas because of encopresis. *shudder*
My Best Tips for Potty Training
To summarize my previous post, with my first child we did it ALL wrong — we started too late, we put him undies right away, we didn’t devote more than a few hours to it at a time. (The WORST advice I got during this time period was to get him underwear with his favorite character on it and then emphasize NOT to pee on the character. Poor, poor Thomas the Train… Let’s just say he had a few unexpected visits to the Water Works.)
With my second child, we started way earlier — in fact, he had a severe language delay, so when we started at around month 29, he barely had enough words. (Well, he had a LOT of words, but he was dropping syllables at the beginning and end of words, and sometimes using the wrong sound entirely to signify a specific word, so… yeah.) I was really worried that he wouldn’t be able to communicate his needs to us!
That said, we had an amazing time with the method laid out in the book Oh Crap! Potty Training by Jamie Glowacki. Unlike my first son, once my second son got it, he GOT IT. (We used to joke that he was a VAULT… I can probably count on one hand the accidents he had.) And it turned out to be great for communication for parents and child.
(With both kids, peeing was a bit different than pooping — with my second, we’d put a diaper on him for naps and sleep, and without fail he would poop in it almost right away. Still, after a month or so (and a lot of encouragement, and perhaps the promise of a special candy or treat) he got the hang of pooping in the toilet, and BOOM! Just like that we were done with our diaper years with our kids.)
Readers, how about you? What things did you try and fail at for potty training? (If anyone has particular experience on this and would like to write an anonymous guest post on any of those trickier issues – constipation, encopresis, etc — we’d love to have you!)
Stock photo via Stencil.
My best advice is to wait until your kid is ready. This is hard, especially when peers are potty training at 2 or earlier. But neither of my kids wanted to potty train until after 3. Then, suddenly, they asked for underpants and potty trained basically overnight. Thank goodness we didn’t force the issue earlier–I think it would’ve been painful for everyone.
For some kids, it’s a switch. For others, it’s….a dimmer switch. I have 3 kids and one was potty trained basically over one weekend. She pooped her undies exactly once and that was that. The second started refusing diapers but also hiding when she had accidents, so that took a while. My third really wanted to be done with diapers but wasn’t ready, so we went the pull ups route (which i swore as a POOPCUP I’d never do!). But honestly? It bridged the gap between 2.5 and 3 for us and allowed her to feel like a big kid even though she wasn’t really ready.
Happy to report on the other side that my kids are now all 5-10 and not in diapers. They do eventually get it!! FWIW my (still in PK) 5 year old does still have the rare accident because she is too busy to stop and pee. We deal with it and move on.