How to Make Potty Training a Positive Experience
A positive potty training experience is vital to a child and parent’s well-being during the process. But often it turns into a negative experience for both child and parent. Too often parents dread even starting potty training, which sets toileting up as a negative experience before it has even begun. Once toilet training has started, parenting conversations become full of stories of potty time battles, how their child just refuses to use the toilet, and parents list all the problems they’ve had along the way. Often parents then give up and go back to diapers because they believe their child just wasn’t “ready.”
Part of the negative experience many parents have with potty training is the push to wait for readiness signs that don’t occur until a child is close to three years of age. Breaking a 3-year diaper habit during the terrible two’s or trying three’s stage does not set parents or kids up to succeed.
The other reasons for such negative experiences rests in the parent’s attitude towards and expectations of potty training, the parent not being ready for potty training, and whether or not the parent or the child is put in charge of the process. Starting with the right attitude, no expectations, and taking charge of the potty training process will help set you and your child up for a positive learning experience rather than a battle.
Be Positive
First and foremost, what will make toilet training a positive experience for you and your child is that you are positive right from the start. Don’t listen to every horror story and ignore the advice that just doesn’t make sense to you. Sometimes listening to other parents can make you dread potty training and that will make it a negative experience from beginning to end as it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.
Instead, look forward to teaching this skill to your child and learning some new parenting skills yourself. Just be positive.
Don’t expect potty training to take just three days or be done by noon. Don’t expect to have potty training done by Christmas, the next birthday, or before vacation. Don’t expect to have a potty trained child one month from now or a year from now. Don’t expect to never have to clean poop off the carpet or pee off of the kitchen floor. Don’t expect to avoid regression or potty pause.
Every expectation of what you think potty training should look like leaves you and your child open to failure.
Don’t Have Expectations of Your Child
Most advice on toilet training today focuses on a child-led approach to toilet training. This makes parents expect their child to potty train themselves. Using a child-led approach makes you expect your child to come to you to tell you he needs to go before he has learned such skills. It may even make you expect your child to use the restroom without assistance. And children will feel this pressure. Every time your child has an accident or has not lived up to the expectations involved with child-led potty training, becomes a failure felt by your child.
Do Have Expectations of Yourself
Take a parent-led approach to potty training and you place the expectations of potty training onto yourself and not your child. With parent-led potty training, parents expect themselves to watch their child and know when she needs to use the toilet. Parents expect to take their child to the toilet before an accident occurs. Parents expect to teach their child a hygienic skill.
With parent-led potty training, parents expect to take on all the responsibility. Failed expectations are a failure of the parent’s and not the child’s. And those failures are easy to fix as you learn from your own mistakes.
Don’t Make Potty Training a Big Deal
In fact, don’t even think of it as potty training or a milestone in your child’s life. Just put your child on the toilet as part of the daily routine. Make it a habit rather than a chore.
Don’t Make Potty Training Complicated
Today’s trend of later potty training really makes toilet training complicated. Because the children are older, they are expected to do much more, including communicating with words the need to potty, getting dressed and undressed, cleaning up, and washing hands, in addition to relaxing and using the toilet.
It doesn’t need to be that complicated. Teach using the toilet and nothing else. This involves sitting your child on the toilet, helping him relax, and celebrating successes. Getting dressed, talking, and washing hands actually have nothing to do with using a toilet. Simplify the process to keep it stress free.
Accidents will happen. They will happen a lot. They will happen at inconvenient times and in embarrassing places. If you are going to stress at every poop and pee in your child’s underwear or on your floor, then you are guaranteeing that potty training will not be positive for you or your child.
Have cleaning supplies at the ready, travel with an extra set of clean clothes, and buy some extra laundry soap. And make the accidents your responsibility and a mistake you made. If your child has an accident, then you did not watch your child for signs he needed to use the toilet or take him there in time. This relieves a large burden from your child and gives you control over the process.
Focus on the Positive
Don’t focus on what went wrong. Don’t focus on every accident or how many clothes you went through in a day. Don’t focus on the fact that your child is not telling you he needs to go. If you want potty training to be positive, then ignore the setbacks and focus solely on the positive.
Focus on every time your child sat on the potty. Focus on every success on the potty. Focus on every time your child does come to you tell you he needs to go. Focus on every day you only had to clean up four accidents, then three, then two, then one.
Celebrate every positive moment in potty training from big to small and make no mention of the negatives. You and your child will find the positive energy contagious.
Enjoy the One on One Time
Potty time is a great time to spend focused on your child. Enjoy the one on one time with your potty trainer and you’ll find that potty training was not a house of horrors or a battle to be fought, but rather time spent bonding with your child.
Being positive and focusing only on the positive does not mean that toilet training will be a garden of roses. You will have challenges and your roses may get peed on. But how you face those challenges and where you place the responsibility for those challenges will predict how positive your potty training experience will be.
