Potty training varies from child to child. I’ve now trained two of my own and both experiences were completely different. My first was easy, my second wasn’t. You can read all the books and you can analyse the signs til you’re blue in the face, but you never really know how it’s going to go until it’s time. And your child is going to have to lead you on this one too. But that doesn’t mean we can’t swap tips and advice on the things that have helped us, does it?
So we have gently been introducing the potty, it’s been sat in the bathroom since G was about 6 months old. This was something I did with big M when she was a baby and was sat on there in between each nappy change, I don’t know if this helped or just the fact that its easier to potty train girls, well it is in my experience but it was very quick and easy to potty train her. This hasn’t been the case with G but I have to take into account that boys do take a little longer. He has been very unwilling to actually just sit on his potty until one day I put little M on it and G must have thought “no, its mine and I want to sit on it” anyway, it had a positive effect and he happily sat on his potty between nappy changes and before he got in the bath so after a few days I thought we would try and go without nappies in the day. The first few days were great with barely any accidents, I kept his bottom half naked so he would be more aware. When it got to the weekend when the other kids were about there was more distraction and more accidents and also when we tried him with pants he had more accidents too.
For the time being we are using nappies again, he has shown no interest in the potty since except when he picked up his thomas toilet seat and got it stuck on his head the other day!
My top 3 tips for potty training are
- Be patient, its no good forcing things because if they aren’t ready you could push your goal further away.
- Lots of praise, even for just trying, reward with cuddles or a star chart, not sweets!
- Try not to get upset about any accidents.
I am no expert, even though I have potty trained twice so although I have a few tips I would love to hear any of your stories or tips too so that when we try again we know what to do better than we did last time.
