For the past 6 months or so we have sporadically put Caroline on the toilet in the morning and right before bath and usually she would go. Well, school finished up and she seemed more interested in using the potty so we decided to just go for it. I pinned a lot of ideas and tips on Pinterest and then set out to potty train. The pin I kept seeing the most was a variation on "potty train your toddler in 3 days" theme. So, the basic idea is to give your kid lots of juice and salty snacks and let them run around naked and put them on the potty every 30 minutes. Give lots of rewards/praise when they make it to the potty. Okay, other than the juice and candy rewards I can handle that. We put her in underwear and asked every 30 minutes. In the first half of the day we went through 10 pair of underwear. I was exhausted and she was cranky and we all just wanted to get out of the house! I could see that the intense method was not working for us. We also couldn't stay housebound for 3 solid days.
So, we decided to try our own, go at her own pace method. I broke down and bought some disposable training pants (I thought about using cloth but I didn't want to make the investment). We put her in the training pants and ask every hour if she needs to go, when she says no we leave it at that and don't push.
After about 3 weeks we started to see her stay consistently dry so we tried underwear again with much better success. We are now working on her recognizing the need to go and telling us.
We are still using training pants during sleep but I'd guess that she'll be nap trained by the time she goes back to school in 6 weeks!
The most valuable lesson I learned from this experience is that each child is unique and you can't force a child to potty!
No comments:
Post a Comment