How to Successfully Potty Train Your Child

Before you read this, it is a good idea to be familiar with my previous articles: “What You Should Know Before You Start Potty Training a Child” and “Prepare Yourself and Your Child for the Potty Training Challenge”. Potty-training a child is a challenge and you should be totally prepared before you begin.

I will refer to the child as “he” to make this article easier to read but you can use this method to toilet train a boy or a girl.

The night before you actually start potty training your child, keep telling him (especially at bedtime) phrases like: “Tomorrow you are going to wear your new big boy pants”, “Mammy’s so proud of you, tomorrow you are going to learn to go to the toilet”.

The big day has arrived. I know this is easy to say and at the end of the day you will feel washed out (I know I did!), but try to be as relaxed as possible. Have a stock of baby wipes ready, they might be made for cleaning babies’ bottoms, but they are also very effective in cleaning carpets and upholstery, as I have discovered. Let’s be honest, you are not going to shampoo your carpet any time your toddler pees on it, leave this for when the toilet training is finished.

Be consistent. If you are ready to give up after a few hours, the little devil will sense this and play on it. Remember that you are the parent so don’t let your child boss you around.

As soon as your child wakes up, bring him to the toilet or potty. Try to keep him sitting there for at least 2 minutes and praise him for being such a good boy sitting on the toilet. If he does something, praise him even more. If nothing comes, say maybe next time and make a fuss about the brand new big boy underwear that he can wear all day. Do not be tempted to use Pull ups; they feel too much like nappies. Try and keep your toddler’s routine as normal as possible.

Set an alarm (on your mobile phone, clock…) to ring every 20 minutes at the beginning. Make sure your child can hear the alarm and when it rings say: “time to go to the toilet!” If he refuses to go, just carry him to the bathroom. Once there, try again to keep him sitting down for two minutes. Give him lots of encouragement and praise him when he uses the toilet.

When he is done, set the alarm to ring again 20 minutes later. If you notice that your child does not do anything most of the time and does not have any accidents in between (which is likely to happen in the case of an older child), increase the interval between the alarms.

When it is time to go to bed, you can put his nappy back on. Try not to put it back on too early, you need to explain that the nappy is only for bedtime but make sure that the he knows he can get out of bed to go to the toilet during the night if he needs to. I had a bit of a hard time with my second daughter who was reluctant to go to the toilet during the day but she kept getting out of bed to go to the toilet until the time she fell asleep (sometimes her nappy was even dry in the morning, I thought she was going to be dry at night-time before day-time!).

You need to be very patient, because this may last a few weeks (sometimes months). Remember that your little darling is learning, don’t scold him for doing something he has been allowed to do all his life, sometimes even encouraged (remember how happy you were when he had a dirty nappy after being constipated?). If he has an accident, just clean it up and say he will have to do it in the toilet next time, try not to react angrily and keep a neutral tone, try to focus on the child’s achievements and get the incident out of your mind as quickly as possible. Children love being praised, it boosts their self-esteem; nagging will only make yourself and the child unhappy and it will not make the potty-training process any easier. Baby wipes, on the contrary, will make your life easier.

If this stage seems to go on forever and your toddler still does not go to the toilet by himself, try to give him more freedom. By this, I mean try to bring him to the toilet less often, remind him that he has to tell you himself when he needs to go to the toilet. You can try rewarding him with a sticker or a sweet when he does something in the toilet (this will only work if you don’t give him any other treats during the rest of the day).

Eventually, he will start telling you when he needs to go to the toilet. Remember that accidents will still happen; this is completely normal so don’t make a fuss. Just be patient and keep smiling. Even when your child is successfully potty trained, it is very important to keep encouraging and praising him, children can sometimes regress after they have been potty trained and I think one of the reasons why is that they are missing the attention they were getting when they were being potty trained.

Potty training is very hard work, both for the children and the parents and it can sometimes feel like you are going insane but once your child starts making progress, your whole world will light up and a few years from now, you will look back on the whole process with a smile and say: “see, it was not so difficult after all!