What Not To Do When Potty Training

I have a neighbor I’ll call Mary who has a son and a newborn daughter. Her son will be 3 in October and attends daycare five days a week. We spent a little time together yesterday and she told me she was having a hard time adjusting to caring for two children instead of one.

Her son is very cute and sweet but he refuses to listen to her when she speaks. I don’t know if the lack of attention span is a result of his age (or if it is because he is so excited by or focused on what he is doing) but her frustration mounts every time she has to call his name. If you try to explain something simply he loses focus after the second word. I would be upset, too, but I have no idea why he is this way and can’t make a judgment about him.

She expressed her annoyance with him to me, and said, “And I just can’t get him potty trained.”

Here’s the thing: there are people who genuinely want your advice and ask you to help them, and there are people like Mary. I like her a lot; she’s bubbly and fun to talk to. But it is clear she has never picked up any books or pamphlets regarding children. Ever. The way she raises her son upsets me because she and her husband shame him a lot (“Bad boy!”) and what’s worse, I just discovered, they punish him when potty training.

“What do you do?” I asked her.

“Well, he poops in his pants a lot so when he does, we either give him a time out in his crib or we take away toys or cartoons,” she said.

Wow. There were so many egregious errors with that statement I had no idea where to begin.

I have a rough time dealing with moms like Mary. I know what experts have said on the subject and it's hard for me not share those answers. I tried to say something like, “Well, you know, pediatricians will tell you not to punish children when potty training,” and she interrupted me and said, “Well, when I tell him he can’t have cartoons because he pooped in his pants, he cries, so it must be working.”

Oh, dear. I didn’t even get to the part about not using his bed as a place to punish him because I knew she would have a quick answer for that as well.

“What does he do at daycare?” I asked her.

“Oh, they say he goes all the time there,” she says. “They never have a problem with him.”

Huh.

“Sounds to me like he has made this into a power struggle with you,” I said.

She sighed and said, “Yeah, no kidding. What do I do?”

I took a deep breath and said, “Well, do you really want my opinion?” In my head I was thinking, “Hello, I have two kids, one of whom I trained in a day, so I might have an idea about what I’m doing.” I waited for her response.

“Okay,” she said unconvincingly.

I told her she should never punish him for having accidents but rather celebrate his successes. “Make a big chart and get a bunch of stickers,” I said. “Every time he poops in the potty make a big deal out of it. Dance, sing, whatever, and give him a couple of stickers to put on the chart. Don't ever punish him. Pretty soon he’ll be going to the bathroom on his own.”

I also told her to stop asking him if he had to go and just make him go. I said his answer will always be no if she asks him. “But then he just sits on the potty and does nothing,” she said.

“Well, if you really know he needs to poop – for instance, if he does it at the same time every day – tell him he can sit as long as he likes, and you’ll be happy to get him some books to read while he waits, but he can’t get down until he poops in the potty.”

She sighed and then started to give me some more excuses. I decided to give up. Like I said, there are those who want to listen and those who just like to complain. She is the latter.

Sometimes I think parents make their lives much, much harder than they need to. Potty training isn’t fun, but if you approach it with a positive attitude and not let it consume you, your child will happily train. To read more about potty training, see a previous post entitled Potty Power!

Photo by Jyn Meyer, courtesy of stock.xchng