Do we have to potty train?

[Hopeful]

I asked this on another board but think I'll get better advice here...

Is potty training really necessary or will a child eventually figure it out (I'm talking about children who were not EC'd)? Will a first child figure it out?

I'm asking bc while I can do the dirtiest, smelliest, leakiest cloth diaper change without any problems emptying a potty of even just the smallest pee makes me wnat to vomit - literally.
Also, I feel that potty training involves a lot of manipulative techniques which I disagree with.

[Bonnie]

I'm in the camp which says when they show real interest and they're going long periods of time dry and clean, they're "ready" to just do it, understanding of course that there are lots of fits and starts. We pushed it with both ours at one point or another and regretted it.

As far as the pouring pee, etc, thing goes, I don't see a *need* for potty seats. We've got one of these (http://www.onestepahead.com/catalog/product.jsp?productId=442794&parentCategoryId=85180&categoryId=117215&subCategoryId=86184), and Nora does pretty well with it, but my absolute favorite is this thing (http://www.onestepahead.com/catalog/product.jsp?productId=6766&parentCategoryId=85180&categoryId=117215&subCategoryId=86184) which can be had for much less elsewhere. Love love love that one, but it won't fit on the seats we have in our current rental. Bah. I did buy some potty chairs at one point, because, well, that's what you *do*, right? But I pretty quickly got rid of them. Why add steps?

[Embracing Grace]

I agree with you regarding the gross/nasty/discusting "empty the potty" ritual. :sick We got rid of our potty and got a little toilet seat cover small enough for ds's butt, and a little step-stool. Works great. And ds loves to flush his stuff down into "the pipes".
As far as readiness goes: ds is turning three next month, and we have not "officially" started to train him. We have read some books and talked to him how he's going to go pee and poop in the toilet someday. One day he just started to ask me to take him pee into the potty. With each new day, he wanted to use the potty more and more, and now he's pretty much potty trained as far as pee goes. He still doesn't want to poop into the toiler, only his diaper, so I think that's going to take a little longer. Anyway, hope this helps!! :)

[inesperada]

I think somewhere in the middle. I don't think it's something that can be forced upon a child or that they need to be "trained" to do. But I think when they are ready and able and willing some (not necessarily all) children need a bit of education and teaching.

[Happygrl]

I guess it depends on what you mean by training. We "trained" DD but we didn't use any manipulative techniques. While I was definitely ready to be done with diapers, I pushed nothing. She had been telling me she needed to potty for awhile (never did when we got to the potty). So at 2.5 I moved the potty chair to the living room but said nothing. She started going in it that day all on her own. But I had to "train" DD on how to get to it in time (remind her when she started crossing her legs). And I had to "train" her to remember to go at certain times of the day (like before we left the house, b/c she didn't think far ahead & first thing in the morning b/c she'd get caught up with breakfast and not make it in time).

Even now, six months later, I still have to sometimes remind her. She knows she has to go but tries to "forget" so she can keep doing whatever. Just her personality.

[Soliloquy]

We didn't potty train Gracie at all. She started it all on her own. She's only wet her pants twice.

yes, you can do it that way. Personally, I think it's the best way, but it's JMO of course.

[klpmommy]

I pushed P to pt & I regret it now. It made things take so much longer, I think. E did it on her own & I plan to do that with this kiddo- which doesn't mean that I won't be "teaching" her, but there won't be the level of "training" that I did with P, if that makes sense. So it might be that this baby needs a gentle "push" in the right direction or something else that doesn't constitute training, but is helping her to udnerstand the whole concept.

One of the best things I did with P is I let him "train" me for a couple of days (this was after we had been PTing for several months). So I would say "I think I have to pee! What do I do?" and then he would walk me through the steps of going to the bathroom, sitting on the toilet, etc. I can definately see doing something like that with this & future babies.

[ranade3]

Both of my dds basically decided they were ready to use the potty and then they did with minimal accidents. They were both 2.5 years. I know not all kids do this so I am thankful for such an easy time of it.

[JavaMama]

We let them choose when they're ready. Dd1 was not ready until after her third birthday. We talked up the potty but we didn't want to force it. Finally, when she was 3y3m old, I didn't want to go down in the basement to pull diapers out of the dryer and told her she should just use the potty. :O Imagine my surprise when she did, I was speaking in jest. That was that and she was using the potty 100%. She was ready, it was painless.

Ds, OTOH, was ready the week of his 2nd birthday but he had accidents for a long time, and still wears a cloth pullup at night. He sleeps deep like his mommy did. ;)

We've done various amounts of EC with dd2, so she uses the potty regularly but also uses plenty of diapers. When she started walking she went through a phase of not using the potty for me, but now she'll indicate she needs to poop and do it in the potty. It's touch and go but I'm cool with diapers or potty either one.

Let me just say, I'm glad ds was out of diapers at age 2 and I hope dd2 will be too. It gets downright nasty changing diapers on a preschooler. :shifty

[ArmsOfLove]

I don't potty train :shrug And my 4th of 5 children is already using the potty--though not consistently :heart

I start out telling them as soon as they are born and getting a diaper change that "when you are ready you are going to go in a potty but until then you get to go in a diaper yadda yadda yadda". They see us use the potty. And eventually they come and ask me if I will take them to the potty and voila :rockon

In fact, when they are really ready I use a bit of discouragement to test their commitment to it ;)

I get the little toilet insert and I have potty chairs that can go to any room :tu I make them available :)

[SansSouci]

Wow - great question!

No, I don't think that you HAVE to potty train. But I also think it depends a LOT on the temperment of the kiddo. I don't think my dd would have EVER PTed if I would've just left it up to her. She loved her dipes, totally didn't care about feeling wet or dirty, and she would go back to dipes today if I let her (she's just about 4.5 y/o).

I know that my dd has a very strong independant opinionated personality (which is fantastic! - truly!), so I knew that I could not "push" PTing onto her whatsoever. So, I modeled (I let her into the bathroom with me all the time). She wanted to try sometimes, so I let her. I did encourage her to, if I felt like she might respond well to encouragement, and she dabbled in it. She actually PTed for an entire week, with only one accident per day right before she turned 3 y/o - she did awesome. But she wanted back in the dipes and I didn't think about saying no, so back in the dipes she went. For the next 9 months I tried suggesting PTing to her, I tried bribing (no pressure, but just mentioning "hey, I'll give you a sticker if you put pee in the potty"), I tried every trick in the book that still fell in line with my AP lifestyle, and she was NOT interested. Also, DH was deployed, so I also figured she wouldn't do it with him gone.

Finally, a few months before she turned 4 (right after DH came home from the deployment and was on leave), someone at the park asked me if she was PTed and was surprised that she wasn't. I told her that I just figured I'd probably PT both my kids at the same time (A is 2.5 years younger then E), b/c E is totally not interested. Well, what do you know?, that evening Emily told me that she wanted to PT. Um, okay! Apparently she didn't want to be PTing at the same time as her baby brother!!! Total divine intervention there! Anways, she PT/PLed right then and there and barely has ever had an accident since! When DH went back to work (after his leave), she refused to go potty and insisted on diapers. I was like "Oh heck no!" b/c there was NO WAY I was going back to dipes after her being fully competent in pottying! lol So after an entire day of "accidents" (she purposefully peed in her underwear b/c she didn't want to potty in the potty with just mommy around), the next day I kept the TV off and told her there would be no TV until she peed in the potty. And I told her that each time she put pee in the potty, she'd earn a TV dollar worth one TV show. By noon she was ready to "play" and she was back to putting pee in the potty and we've never looked back!

Right at 4 y/o was when she decided to go #2 in the potty. I did bribe her with that. We had just moved into a home with a pool, and she was constantly asking to swim. I told her that if she pooped in the potty, then we could go swimming that day. She totally loved that deal, and it worked out great! I'm not a fan of bribery, but I think that dd needed that extra push of motivation, and of me taking back a little bit of her control, so that she would realize that PTing IS a GOOD thing! But I will emphasize that NO amount of bribery worked for her UNTIL she was ready. And I don't mean "physically" ready - b/c she was physically ready and able when she was 3 y/o. But she wasn't emotionally ready to do it until just about 4. That was a very frustrating year for me, b/c I practiced so much restraint (especially when people insisted that I ought to try xyz to get her to PT) b/c I put NO pressure on her and I just tried to model, and encourage her about once per month or so.

And, no, you don't have to do the little tiny potty. You can just get one of those small seats that fits into the big seat of the toilet, and get a step so the kiddo can get up to it. My dd didn't want to do potty in the little potty whatsoever (fine with me - it grossed me out!), so I just tossed that one in the car and we use it when we're out and about, if necessary!

[railyuh]

I don't plan on potty training. I prefer to think of it as potty learning. DS is only 19 months, but he's started using the potty on occasion. We don't make a big deal of it, it's just something he was interested in doing. He sees us using the potty (yes, we allow DS in the bathroom while we are in there) and he wanted to try, so a few weeks ago I set him up there and he pooed (we don't EC or anything either). So now we just give him more opportunities to use it, especially times when we notice he tends to go anyway, like at the end of his bath. I don't think he'll be out of diapers anytime soon, but I just see it as him getting comfortable with the potty (he looves flushing!) and learning to recognize how it feels when he needs to go and all that stuff.

Anyway, we did buy him a potty a while back to get him familiar with it, but he just uses it as a chair. He's only interested in the real toilet as a potty, so we got these (they were cheap too so we were able to get them for both bathrooms): http://www.onestepahead.com/catalog/product.jsp?productId=5794&cmSource=Search I actually ordered them from a different site because we needed one standard size and one for an elongated bowl, but I can't remember off hand what the other site was that had both sizes.

[Ali]

I like how Dr Sears phrases it on his website. He says something to the effect of - You don't do nothing, because they do need some guidance. But it depends a whole lot on the personalities of the child and mother exactly when and how child will transition from diapers to potty. He says don't worry one bit about the age of your child, despite what the IL's say! ;)

We also potty learned straight onto the big potty.

[MtnMama]

We got Lily a fancy shmancy, bright green potty chair when she turned 18 months old, just to add color to our bathroom, apparently. :giggle She liked to sit on it, but never to pee or poo. :shrug But then one fateful day she told me she needed to peepee and when I took her to her chair, she said, "No, Mommy." and pointed to the toilet. Confused, but following her lead, I steadied her on the toilet and she PEED in the toilet. :jawdrop She was 20 months old. We got her one of those cheap inserts others mentioned and she uses the pretty green seat as a stepping stool.

In all honesty, I would rather her wait a bit until she's more able to help out with the process. I really only introduced the chair at all because I thought it would be a fun something to do. :O I never expected her to take to it so much.

And here's something no one ever told me: going to sleep at night (and naps) starts a whole, "Pee pee, Mommy! Go pee pee!" and later, "More pee pee, Mommy! More pee pee!" So we have lots of night runs. That's an instance where I wish I had just waited longer to really introduce the concept. I never pushed her, to be sure, but I don't think she's really old enough to accumulate a lot of pee to go once and be done with it for a while.

[Allison]

:think I think that eventually they will just do it themselves. My older two were around 3 when they decided to use the potty and that was that.

[donnettacb98]

I asked this on another board but think I'll get better advice here...

Is potty training really necessary or will a child eventually figure it out (I'm talking about children who were not EC'd)? Will a first child figure it out?

I'm asking bc while I can do the dirtiest, smelliest, leakiest cloth diaper change without any problems emptying a potty of even just the smallest pee makes me wnat to vomit - literally.
Also, I feel that potty training involves a lot of manipulative techniques which I disagree with.


All three of mine did it on their own when they were ready. The one that was done the lastest was only 3 years 3 months. They did day and night on their own in one day.

[me]

No, you dont have to potty train.
But just like teeth brushing or bathing, they would probably benefit by observing how its done and the correct steps to hygine. But other than that, no, you dont have to do anything with them.
Figuring it out on their own and them actually seeing the benefit to putting the steps into practice are two different things. Generally, children figure out what is going on in the potty around two years, give or take. But that doesnt mean they want to "do" or practice at what they have figured out.
Depending on the type of society and social influences will play a huge part in when they see the benefits of "doing" if you should take a totally hands off approach. If you are comfortable with diapers and more comfortable with your child comming to the conclusion of why she should on her own, :shifty you dont have to worry about changing a 10 year olds diaper :giggle They will eventually see the benefits at some point, that is just how our society is. At what point that is, is probably something you are better at guessing at. If a child is left with another caregiver or in playgroups where bathrooms are available but not changing areas, that would be an example of how society and peer pressure would play a role. Its normal to want to be a part of society, so I think normally any child would fit into their surroundings and ditch the diaper.
In a nutshell, I always think that it comes down to convenience and benefits for the turning point in a childs mind when they no longer appreciate the use of a diaper. Ive done traditional "training", ec'ing, and the hands off approach :)