Let me just share some quick stats with you! Piggie has been using the potty for about 3 weeks now.
- He's had a handful of accidents in the last month where he barely wets himself, not even enough to change his underwear, but he's able to stop the flow of urine and go to the potty to finish. So do those even count as accidents?
- He's had ONE full pee accident, and it was yesterday. My mom had come over and brought new toys and he was totally thrown off.
- He's had ZERO poop accidents. Poop, I've been told, seems to be the hardest concept for boys to get when potty training. And he doesn't hold his poop, either.
- He never wets himself while napping and we do still have him in a diaper at night, but he usually wakes up dry.
- We just went on a 6 hour road trip to San Diego, and he had ZERO accidents there and back. We brought his potty along in the car and he would tell us when he needed to go.
- While on vacation, he went pee and poop in public restrooms with no problem.
This has been the easiest experience ever!! I seriously thought potty training a boy was going to leave me bald from pulling hair out, but it's been so easy I almost forget it even happened.
What did I do for such an easy experience?
I waited until my son initiated potty training on his own.
He was three and half years old before he walked up to me one evening with a worried look on his face and uttered the phrase "Mommy, I have to go to the potty!" while wearing a diaper.
Oh, what a glorious sound to a mother's ears. A mother who has been changing diapers for three and half years.
But I would rather change a diaper than deal with frequent accidents for who knows how long. My friend told me of a saying "You can start at two and be done by three, or start at three and be done by three." I reminded myself of that saying many a time when I was changing a stinky diaper.
Piggie is also a more cautious child, as well as a late bloomer. He needs to do things on his own terms. So this is another reason why I think this worked out so well for him.
Some things I did do to try to ripen his interest in going to the potty:
- Asked him frequently during diaper changes if he was ready to use the potty. I got the answer "no" for a very long time.
- Set a potty out.
- Read some potty books.
- Had him watch the Daniel Tiger episode where he learns to use the potty, multiple times. It's on Netflix!
- Bought superhero underwear because he loves superheroes.
Twice, he acted like he was going to be interested. Both times he went pee in the potty several times in one day, but then insisted to have his diaper back and I didn't hear another word about the potty for months. Patience.
He had "signs" of getting closer to being ready to potty train long before he actually wanted to. He was interested in me using the toilet before he was two, when he was two his nap and nighttime diapers started getting drier and he started asking to have his poop diapers changed, and when he was three he started leaving the room to go poop in privacy in his diaper.
He had "signs" of getting closer to being ready to potty train long before he actually wanted to. He was interested in me using the toilet before he was two, when he was two his nap and nighttime diapers started getting drier and he started asking to have his poop diapers changed, and when he was three he started leaving the room to go poop in privacy in his diaper.
I was just waiting for his desire to potty train.I read this article a few years ago after my midwife posted it on Facebook. The author is a pediatric urologist, and he put a little bit of a scare in me regarding early training and also reassured me that it's okay and definitely not lazy to let your child train on their own time. A mom was quoted at the bottom of the article stating,
"My son wasn't trained until he was 3.5 and it just clicked. My daughter is 3 and is giving me a hard time, but I have a feeling it will be the same way. Rest assured, they will not be going off to school still wearing diapers, so I don't push it. There are more important things in life to stress over."
I'm not gonna lie, I doubted my plan many times, thinking if I didn't "buckle down" and train him, he was going to be in diapers forever. It felt like everyone around us was out of diapers. Yet really, at three and a half years old, he's at a pretty average age for boys to be officially potty trained.
But seriously, this whole potty training experience has been a breeze. It was like one day he was in diapers and the next he acted as if he'd been using the potty for months. He just knew and got it like that. It was definitely a benefit of waiting for him to be older and initiating it himself.
If you have any potty training tips, please leave them below for the ones who are here reading for some insight!
Cindy Hasko
Karen