Helpful Hints for Potty Training

Inspiring Dread

Potty training can be difficult and while most parents look forward to the end of diapers, messes, and accidents, it's only natural that potty training inspires dread in some of even the most seasoned moms and dads. Here are some helpful hints that, if you'll just give them a try, may have you scratching your head and wondering why you were so nervous about potty training in the first place!

Incentives-Choose something your child likes, such as a sticker chart and star stickers, a bag of little toys to choose from, or treats. Every time your child is successful, give him have a reward from your arsenal of goodies.

Involvement-Let your child be involved in cleaning up his messes, wiping himself, getting clean undies, or throwing a dirty diaper away.

Yay! A Party...

Underwear Ceremony-discuss with your child that it may be time to change into regular underwear. Throw a party to make it official. After that, it becomes his responsibility to care for soiled underwear. He may need to hang his undies to dry, or scrub out stains and messes. You can make him responsible for getting and changing into a clean pair of underpants when need be.

Easy Does it-Make a rule that he can only have bowel movements in the bathroom. That means that even if he's still in diapers, he can walk into the bathroom and dirty his diaper while in that room. That gets him used to the idea that the bathroom is the place where people have movements. You can teach him to take his diaper on and off and to sit on the toilet, if he likes. Make sure he gets lots of praise, every step of the way.

Make it a Habit-Have him sit on the potty for 5-10 minutes every few hours, even if he's not yet comfortable with the idea of using the toilet for its intended purpose. Praise him for sitting there.

Never Punish-Never, ever, make him feel bad about having an accident, being wet, or being dirty. You can verbalize and let him feel your disappointment, but never raise your voice or lay a guilt trip on him.

I feel just as overjoyed as those parents who have sent you their success stories. What greater happiness than a kiddy who is finished with diapers!!! :-) Some of my friends were really skeptical "it will stress the child", "so much pressure for the child and yourself". Well, I actually had a friend visiting the whole while I was training my son and she said after that she had expected much more mess and said it was so easy! She was telling everyone she spoke to about it :-) My husband had not expected it to be so easy either, he thought I was going to give up if day one was loaded with messes.. I'm sure he would have given up! So no more diapers, whoopee!!!

Here are the results of our son's toilet-training process:
Day 1: 2 pees and 1 pooh in his undies, we never got to the toilet on time :(
Day 2: many pees outside (he told us when he wanted to go, he preferred to do it outside than inside) and 1 pooh in his undies
Day 3: TA-DA!!! Though he went outside to pee (he told us each time), he went to the toilet to pee under supervision and then after a while he went to do his very first pooh in the toilet all BY HIMSELF!!! Followed by a second later on in the day.. He did forget himself once though and wet himself before he realized what was happening.. but he's a kid of course and kids do forget..

Thanks again!! This has made a big difference for us! (Imagine, even my mom in Holland was keeping herself updated!)

Claudia