Potty Training: What Worked for Us

I come from a family where everyone, including myself was potty trained by a year of age. Upon asking my mother what the secret was, she said that introducing the potty to your child as early as 8 months of age and making sure that you sit him on it every 45 minutes to an hour will ensure a smooth transition from diaper to potty regardless of the child's gender. The key to this method is consistency, which is easy when you are a stay at home mom that never, ever leaves the house.

I am a stay at home mom myself, but unlike my mother, I love to leave the house with my son in tow and go to the parks, museums, shopping, etc. My family's method of early potty training was not going to work for me and I knew that right off the bat. I did, however, like the idea of introducing the potty to my son early on so that it would be something he would view as normal and natural and therefore rebel less against it when the time came to really potty train him. At 9 months of age I would sit him on the potty once in the morning and once at night and he delighted in sitting while I read him a short book, then he was up and into a diaper.

At about a year and half, my husband and I decided that it as time to move on to a little more advanced potty training. We started sitting him on the potty every time we changed one of his diapers at home. This was in order to make the whole experience more common for him and therefore easier to get used to, and so that he would be able to start putting two and two together....pee or poop in the diaper means sitting on the potty. A few months later I bought my son several packages of big boy training pants/undies and started letting him wear those around the house instead of diapers.

I tried Pull-Ups, but since they are pretty much a diaper my son wasn't "feeling" what was going on. With the undies he immediately would feel wet or poopy and would look down and let me know what had happened. At this point I would walk him over to the potty and sit him down, clean him up and then put on clean undies. After a week of doing this my son was warning me that he had to "pee pee" or "poo poo". Sometimes the warnings would come after the fact, but with each new day the accidents became less and he was using the potty like a pro.

My son is now 2 1/2 and potty trained. Pooping did take more of an effort than peeing in the potty did. I never rewarded him with anything more than praises when he would pee in the potty, but I found it helpful to offer him a sticker or small lollipop for the poops. I also found it very helpful to have his potty in full view which meant sitting it in the living room rather than "hidden" in the bathroom. Toddlers get very busy playing and can easily forget about a potty that they can't see. He still wears diapers at night since he wakes up with very full diapers in the mornings and I am not yet wanting to cross the bridge of getting woken up every few hours with him telling me what bodily function he is about to perform. Call me crazy, but I love my sleep! I figure when he is old enough to get up and out to the bathroom on his own in the middle of the night, we'll say good-bye to the nighttime diapers.

Basically, what worked for us was introducing the potty to our son early on so that it was already a part of his nomal daily life by the time he was ready to start using it. Once we decided he could start trainng we had him use undies that would allow him to feel what was going on and therefore make him aware of his body functions. Diapers nowadays are so absorbent that messes are literally whisked away from the child's bottom and it would take gallons of pee for them to feel anything. We rewarded him with praises for the peeing and little prizes for the more difficult pooping and it has worked wonders in a peaceful and non traumatizing way. My son is also a very active and independent boy so thismethod is not one that would work only on a sedate child. It can work with anyone!