Shockingly, I didn’t go to Harvard. I haven’t read all the baby books. And I’ve only potty trained one child. And I’ve only done it using one particular method. But just like you’re trying to teach your child to listen to their gut as to when to go pee pee or poo poo, my wife and I listened to ours in determining when our child was ready to start potty training.
First off don’t Google too much. You don’t want that mommy your daddy guilt weighing on you as to why you’re 18 month / 24 month / 36 month child is still peeing or pooping in their diaper. As Owen Wilson taught us on Career Day: we’re all just unique little pods, waiting to get the call from the mother ship. In other words, everyone is on their own schedule.
When your child starts talking about going potty, or pulling out their pants, or showing interest in the process, that’s when I would initiate Project Towel – whatever age that may be.
So let me explain the Project Towel approach to potty training for when that time ultimately does come along. Project Towel is an acronym my IP attorneys are saying will soon be fully trademarked; it stands for The Only Way Everyone Learns (to pee. and poop. in a toilet). But, more accurately, it stands for the fact that you’re going to lay a crap ton of towels on the ground that will collect a whole bunch bunch of pee and maybe even some poop as you spend 48 hours teaching your child to go to the bathroom. The acronym is just a little more punchy.
Anyway, I highly recommend doing this over the weekend because – come Monday – they’ll be back at school … or daycare … or with a nanny … or you’ll be at work … and life will get in the way. You really need at least two full days to go cold turkey.
So what are you doing exactly? You:
- strip your kid down so they’re completely naked,
- set up a room with towels on the ground,
- keep a portable potty with you and the moment they start to go you put them on that toilet.
- do the above all day long. The next day, too.
Of course you can instead slow roll it such that you still have your weekend to do weekend things. But I don’t recommend this. Rip that Band-Aid off and commit. This is the biggest piece of advice I can give. Commit. Come Monday, regardless of what level of success you had over the weekend, don’t put that pull-up or diaper back on them. Put their new big kid underwear on, and pack extra clothes. The first week will suck. The second week will probably suck, too. But you do NOT want to reset the clock. Stay committed. Take solace in the fact that 80 billion human beings have at one point learned to pee and poop and that your child is about to be one of them. They WILL get through it.
When purchasing a potty training potty, I recommend one with handles; it helped prevent our 2 year old from losing balance and not falling off while sitting down. You’ll also want to get a foldable one for on-the-go purposes.
We also created an incentive program. At the time my daughter was obsessed with stickers, so we had a potty training sticker chart. She loved putting her Peppa Pig stickers on this big posterboard hung on the refrigerator every time she went. Whether it’s that or some other incentive program, be sure to show tons of excitement after each completed successful act. You’ll find that success begets more successes.
Lastly, poop takes longer than pee to master. At least it did for ours and it seems that’s pretty common. Don’t be surprised if it takes weeks or even a month or two longer for the poop routine to settle in then the pee routine. (We’ll cover constipation and the lovely methods of dealing with stage fright at a later date).
I’ll leave you with this. When it comes to ‘dropping the kids off at the pool’, one evening while doing bath time my daughter decided to drop her kids off right in the bathtub…
The point? Shit. It happens.
Keep that in mind as you venture on your voyage with your little one.
Stick with it. Commit. And Godspeed.
Anthony Guerreso