Last week we started potty training our #2 child. It was probably the longest week of my life.
This is one of those parts of parenting that you need to go through eventually and it's not going to be fun. While worth it in the end, the interim is pretty miserable, especially if you have a stubborn and independent kid. We had an inkling this go round would be much more challenging than the first and yet still, once again I was not ready. Last time I missed the crucial first few days but this time I was there for it all.
Before getting into it, I have to say there's a huge difference between working on this with an individual kid versus doing it with multiple. I don't know how we could've tackled it if our eldest wasn't in preschool all day or if we both weren't home (my wife was off M-Th) so one could care for the baby when the other focused on the task at hand. How do single parents do it?
As we did with our #1 child, now four, we went with the method in Oh Crap! Potty Training. This means he wore diapers as usual up to the date (last Monday) we choose to start. In the morning we took the one he was wearing off, for good, and told him he was done with them. Before then he'd sat on the toilet a few times but I don't believe he'd ever gone in there successfully. Now the safety net was gone and he was running around without anything below his waist at all. We put plastic over the rug and couch on our main level, which is all hard surfaces, and trapped him there. To many this may be an extreme way of approaching this, but it also, in theory, is supposed to get through the process as efficiently as possible.
The idea of going naked down there involves two things. First it's strikingly different for the kid, there's no confusing being naked with wearing a diaper like pants and/or underwear could. Ideally he learns to control when/how he goes almost immediately. Second, there's no hiding anything he's doing and it's the parents job to keep eyes on him and learn any tells. For the first two whole days, really, that's all we did. We intently watched our son and brought him to the toilet either when he went on the ground somewhere or when we thought he might soon based on what we were seeing. There was a lot of time spent in the bathroom and a lot of messes to clean up. We were successful in getting most of his pee into one of the several toilet options those first two days, but it felt more like luck and a byproduct of the time we forced him to sit on the potty than any positive habit forming.
What was easily the worst part is his willful defiance, as this kid simply does not want to do what we ask of him. Normally this means he refuses to help clean up when he's made a big mess, like of books or flash cards or puzzle pieces. Or he runs away when it's time to go out for an errand and we ask him to get his shoes and coat. Now it meant he held it as long as he could and screamed at us when we tried to get him to periodically use the toilet, and it felt like this was our entire day. It didn't feel good, and it drained us emotionally, but he gets his stubbornness from his parents, in particular his mother. He wasn't going to beat us and this was happening whether or not he liked it. Though we learned right away that he has good bladder control, the first day was unsurprisingly the worst. I basically passed out before 9pm, way earlier than I ever go to sleep.
Starting on day three, however, things started to get better. For starters we put him in pants. A bigger part was a very intentional hands off approach, as at this point we believed he knew when his body was telling him to go and we needed to trust him. It's that independence. If we told him to go he'd fight us and everyone would be miserable. And while there were still a few messes, he started to do really well. With peeing at least. We soon took off the plastic, which we all hated, and let him have more free run of the house again. With more normalcy more came improvement. It felt good when I didn't need to watch him every second.
There are still difficulties. The obvious one is thus far unspoken: poop. It's clear he didn't/doesn't want to do this in the toilet, probably just because it feels extra strange and doesn't want to sit on the toilet for very long. So it feels pretty clear that when he's running back and forth from playing, eating, whatever to the bathroom every few minutes he needs to have a BM. These have ended up in places other than the toilet more often than not, so far, but I think we're on the verge of figuring that out.
Another is sleeping. Right now he's still in an enclosed crib so we're playing with fire but we're also a little terrified to let him loose at night. Pretty amazingly he's been dry during naps from the start, though I need to make sure to briskly get him out of there when he wakes up. We've even been going diaper-less overnight. I've needed to wash his sheets every morning (up until today!) but it's also good we're seeing what he can do. I think we've learned that he can't stay dry all night and we need to wake him up at least once, which was also very very difficult at first, with lots of screaming at us, but has slowly got better. We may still end up using pull-ups, but we haven't as yet.
The final one is on me more than it's on him. I need to gain comfort in leaving the house for longer stretches and testing how well he handles it and communicates with me. Right now I don't want to leave the house more than, for example, a quick run to our eldest's preschool like five minutes away. But life needs to go on. A new challenge begins.
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