Comments on: Potty Learning – How and Why to Let Children Lead the Way

By: Kayla Kelly

Kayla Kelly — Tue, 04 Apr 2023 14:42:36 +0000

This is interesting advice to me. Personally, we chose to do Elimination Communication. I think you have the right idea that children want to make this step, but I think we’re wrong in thinking it’s best to take that step at 3 or 4 when they’ve been taught their whole lives they’re not smart enough to use the toilet and to poop in a diaper , then to suddenly change the game. Of course you’ll be met with resistance. I’d encourage anyone to look into EC. Go all in or do the modified/laid back. Both of my children poop on the potty from infant age with occasional poops in the diaper. It’s their natural urge to not soil themselves. This does not mean you make them hold it or anything – you’re just offering them a chance to poop on the potty when you know they have to go. It can be really simple and it’s respecting them from the get-go, avoiding battles later, and also avoids years of cleaning poopy diapers. Our dogs can learn to be potty trained, why don’t we think our children are smart enough?

By: Amy

Amy — Mon, 23 Jan 2023 13:54:06 +0000

Hi Janet,

Thank you for sharing this advice. We’ve had our now 4 year old girl show interest, she tried to learn in the summer before she turned 4 in October as she’d for the first time showed interest in the potty. We let her lead and gave her reminders when we could and used pants for her. She wasn’t quite mastering it and so we spoke about what we’d do next. She wanted to go back to diapers and so we have done with her and said for her to tell us when she’s ready to try again. She’s not emotionally ready as she doesn’t show when she wees or poos.

We’ve had a second baby in December and she would have had a hard time settling emotionally with the change and all the work on the potty. I occasionally ask her if she’d like to try and she doesn’t want to yet.

I think it will be a while until she is ready again and I was just looking for reassurance that this is the correct approach or if I should be given more regular hints and reminders. We’ve got a supportive preschool and kindergarten which would allow her in pull ups .

Thanks for your advice on this, I hope she’s ready soon but I won’t rush her

By: Cynthia

Cynthia — Tue, 13 Dec 2022 00:58:26 +0000

In reply to Cynthia. I wanted to add I was referencing not showing much concern for the potty learning. We were mellow and easy going about . That really helped.

By: Cynthia

Cynthia — Tue, 13 Dec 2022 00:54:25 +0000

Janet I absolutely love your podcast. I run a a small outdoor based nature program for children ages 1-5. I was inspired by RIE when I began group care. We also have three boys of our own. I wish I would have used the RIE approach with our first two boys because our third son embraced it because we basically didn’t show much concern for it. I finished the RIE Foundation’s Course last summer and look forward to continuing this joinery. Your podcast is an inspiration to me as a mother and caretaker. Thank you for trusting Magda and continuing this work with such grace.

By: Jennifer Maccarone

Jennifer Maccarone — Mon, 01 Aug 2022 13:25:46 +0000

In reply to Erica.

I’m in a very similar situation and also so frustrated. I’ve read so many books and articles but none seem to address this!

My 2.5yo well and truly led the process not long after turning 2. We followed his lead. Now he won’t poo in the toilet at all and hasn’t for almost 2 mths. He says ‘I need to poo’ and I say ‘you know where the toilet is, off you go, I’ll be there to help if you need me’. Most times he wants me to come with him straight away. We get there and he has already soiled his pants.
Sometimes he laughs at me and says ‘ha I pooed my pants!’ I don’t know what to do or say. I suggested maybe going back to nappies, maybe he’s not ready and he went into hysterics about being a big boy.

Janet please help!

By: Aukje

Aukje — Tue, 29 Mar 2022 11:47:06 +0000

Hi Janet,
I’ve only recently discovered your podcasts (hence the late reply to this one) and I’ve instantly become a fan. Pretty much all of your podcast have me going ‘off course!’, ‘aha!!’ or ‘now it starts making sense’… but listening to this podcast on potty training I was actually quite shocked. Let me start by saying we don’t have any issues with our daughter and her journey towards becoming ‘potty trained’, so maybe I’m seeing this from a privileged point of view. But…
With our daughter we started very early with a kind of potty. She tended to poop right after we took off her diaper, causing quite the mess. 🙂 We got a tip to try and hold her over a potty, right after taking off her diaper, so at least we’d avoid the mess. We started doing this at maybe 3 months and by the time she was 1, she was pooping on a potty. Let me stress, that we never made a big deal out of her pooping in her diaper, and that we never tried to actively train her. Interestingly, we did become a lot more attuned to her ‘patterns’. So, in a way, we were potty trained. 😉 And that’s the first thing that I missed in this episode. I really believe it is important to point out to parents that our bowel movements are just as natural as our sleeping patterns, or our dietary habits. And once we see them in that light it’s really easy to become more attuned to them. Within months, we could see when our daughter was peeing or pooping, we’d recognise if she was having trouble, having tummy aches etc. And often, we could easily connect the dots between her diet, or things that had happened that influenced those issues. It’s like how we know what kinds of food our kids will eat more from, or what they need to be able to sleep well.
Additionally, because we got so attuned to her, we also quickly understood that our daughter needs to eat enough fruit, but not too much banana, to ensure she can ‘go easily’ and at her regular frequency. And that’s the next thing that really shocked me about this podcast. I understand that there may be situations where a laxative is the only answer, but why not also point parents to the importance of our diet for a healthy bowel?
The final statement that bothered me, was the one about not starting too early with potty training. This statement assumes that kids have to be potty trained. Off course, if you’re not in a position to hold your kid over a potty from 3 months, or if you decide to wait with any kind preparation, yes, then I agree, don’t force it on a kid that’s not ready. But our little girl has grown into this so naturally and gradually, I doubt she’ll have to be trained at any point. She’s now almost 3 and we regularly have dry diapers throughout the whole day. She wears cloth diapers, so we have to change a little more often, which means she has the opportunity to go to the toilet every 2-3 hours. We don’t pressure her, if she doesn’t have to go, she doesn’t have to go. And if she wants to go just minutes after putting on a fresh diaper, then so be it, and she will go again. By now, she is very well aware of when she needs to go. She’s capable of telling us, and of waiting until she’s actually on the toilet. She’s also expressed that she sometimes just wants to pee in her diaper and on other days she wants to wear regular underwear and she’ll go on her potty or the toilet throughout the day. I’ve heard similar experiences from other parents, especially from those using cloth diapers. My favourite is of the girl that simply informed her parents one day that she didn’t need her diaper anymore and just went from diapers to underwear without any kind of potty training, with very few accidents and no real fuss.
Again, I’m well aware I’m in a privileged position, being able to take this approach and I’m not suggesting this will work for everyone. But I would have loved to hear an expert opinion on this. Especially since this approach (and the more extreme ones where kids are never in diapers to begin with!) has in fact been connected to better bowel health at later ages, to reduced issues with bedwetting, etc.

I hope I’m not offending anyone with my comment. Again, I’m very well aware that sometimes there are no ‘easy’ answers. And for those cases I’m very thankful for the information you put forward in this post. But maybe there are chances to avoid some of these problems in the first place…

Thank you so much for all your work!
Love,
Aukje

By: Erica

Erica — Sun, 06 Mar 2022 07:59:21 +0000

Hi Janet,
My son will be 3 in June. He started to show signs of interest and wanting to use the potty a couple of months after his 2nd birthday. My husband and I were thrilled. I bought a seat with a step latter that sits on the toilet. We were armed with encouragement, praise, and ofcourse excitement every time he would go (which worked and then didn’t). In August he moved up to the 2 year old class at school. This is when the teachers start potty training in order for them to move to the 3yr old class they have to be “trained” with no more than 3 accidents a week. Since September he has mastered the potty at school, and has had maybe 5 accidents and that is all. Now at home, we have a completely different and exasperating situation! He does really good for a period of time. He will tell us he needs to go and he goes, there are several days without accidents, dry pull ups in the mornings, and he even used the toilet 100% on his own without telling me until I saw him in the bathroom trying to pull up his pants afterwards. We have highs and lows, a rollercoaster that never stops. I’ve read many of your posts and listend to your podcasts. We stepped back and let him lead the way to the potty. We stopped asking if he needed to go and instead let him tell us when, we stopped encouraging him to go, and we stopped with the praise and worship of the almighty toilet! It worked. For a while. Now he will tell us he needs to go, and we reply “okay, well let’s go” or “would you like me to help”, when we get to the bathroom he turns around and starts crying “no, i don’t need to” or “no I don’t want to”. He is litteraly squirming and needs to go, but I will say “are you sure? It looks like you do?” Or sometimes I will brush it off and say “okay, maybe later” and eventualy after a few times of the back and forth he will go. He has started to hold his pee and poop(he might poop 2-3 times a week) until his stomach starts to hurt and he is ready to burst. It is like he wants to, but is afraid, or just doesn’t want to take the time to just go. But he knows how to and he knows that it is a good feeling to go on the toilet. For these past 2 weeks he will tell us and then refuse then will have full pull up later or will just look at me and pee in his pull up after refusing to go to the toilet when he just said he needed to go. I am about to loose my mind over here! There are two times during the day we rarely ever experience refusal, before nap and before bath. I am worried about the holding and the problems it might cause later. Our pediatrician recommend miralax and a time schedule. At this point I am tempted try it. I’ve considered not buying anymore pull ups and just let him wear undies, but he refuses to wear them. I am at my wits end, please help!?

By: janet

janet — Sun, 30 Jan 2022 19:23:47 +0000

In reply to Stacey innes. Hi Stacey! Thank you for sharing your awesome and helpful story. I'm sure others reading will appreciate it! And it's my absolute pleasure to share the ideas that have brought such clarity to me in raising my 3 children. What a lucky child to have you as a parent!

By: Stacey innes

Stacey innes — Sun, 30 Jan 2022 11:27:32 +0000

Hi Janet,
Thank you so much for this perspective. Its definitely food for thought. I completely agree with you and we had this own experience with our son.

He started becoming interested in poop. He would stop at 18 months and look at it in the park. We spent 3 months discussing it. Then he started looking at the toilet. So i ordered books about it and left them in his room. Every night he would pick one to read. Sometimes he’d ask us to read one whilst he played in his tent. Other times he never chose one and we didn’t ask. Be sure he was listening to every word. At 24 months he was fascinated with the flushing motion and toilet paper so we followed it out to the drains. We put boundaries around paper and he knew he could only use 1 piece. This he respected as he also had a fascination with recycling. I think it was hard for us to trust the timeline of his process. My son needed to understand every aspect before he wanted to try. He then started to tell us when he was peeing or pooping in his diaper. At this stage the reassurance it was fine and just to let it go was all he needed.
He also began at 24 months removing his trousers and pull up. 2 months later he began to use the potty. It was again our responsibility to go at his pace. We found simple acknowledgement was enough. ‘Thank you for using the toilet’. We never take him to the toilet, we never ask him to go. We only tune into him and watch for his signal he needs to go then we say ‘your toilet is there if you need to use it.’ We found in the moments he does need to go the best thing we can do is trust him and give him space.

The first time my son pooped on the potty he cried. It could have been a time we rushed to reassure him all was good and how wonderful it was. Tuning in meant, acknowledging actually he wasn’t sure whether it was good. İn fact it was scary for him. Here is where following his process really helped. We spent time looking at it in potty, talking about it. Then we took it to toilet and flushed it away following drains. It was meaningful to him and it was personal. He reviewed the process again at night checking it in his own words, ‘Poo toilet. Flush away. Poo gone. Sun up poo again’. It was hard to trust and not mention using toilet to poop but i knew instinctively that he was processing it.

You have helped me so much with my own fear and my language. Its hard but its so worth it. The podcasts and your books have helped me manage my own fear when it was getting in the way during this process. Its not perfect and i still have days where i slip back into directing mode but generally the whole toilet training experience has been a happy connected time for our family. Exhausting managing myself but fun and enjoyable. Simply breathing and trusting my son was all it needed. Thank you for sharing your wisdom with us.