Ok, friends...help me out! I have a 3 year old who is not potty trained. Not only not potty trained, has absolutely ZERO interest in using the "big boy potty". Not only zero interest, he frankly could care less if he sits in a diaper full of poo for hours on end. Seriously. How do you convince a kid to use the potty when he thinks being sopping wet and wretchedly stinky is no big deal?
I swear, I'm going to have the first kid who grows out of all regular diapers and has to start wearing Depends.
At his 3 year check-up, our doctor recommended laying off the "potty-talk" (so to speak) for a whole month. Don't suggest it, don't try it, don't talk about it...nothing. If he mentions it, fine. But we are not to initiate a conversation about, say the phrase "big boy potty", or even make eye-contact with the Lightening McQueen potty for a whole month. Then he said we should try again, only this time use completely different incentives. If it was stickers before, it should be M&M's now, or whatever. We may go straight to the standing-to-potty method. Yes, I expect a mess...but there has to be some way to encourage the kid to want to use the potty. Not to get too graphic (and Kevin may kill me for this), but Cameron has recently observed Kevin's pottying prowess, and now talks constantly about "Daddy goes potty like fireman".
Hey, whatever works.
Just to help, Taylor wasn't full on potty trained until she was four. Completely uninterested, no incentives worked, and I drove myself nuts. But, she eventually got there on her own.
ReplyDeleteYou know, that doesn't sound so encouraging after all. Maybe just commiserating. :)
Oh Man! That is sooo frustrating! Let's see, I have NO good advice. Carter potty trained at 2 1/2 then regressed for 6 months when Caroline was born. The one thing that kind of worked was keeping him in underwear during the day and taking him every hour on the hour to sit on the potty. Eventually he went so often in the potty that he put the two and two together. I was also the terrible mom that told him he would not be having a 3 yo bday party if he wasn't...only because I knew he was totally capable sine he had been potty trained for 2 months with no problems:). All in all it was such a crazy miserable time that I had decided that I would never do all that again and would let the child decide when they wanted to. Caroline decided on her own at 3...its a girl thing!! I am rambling...because looking back I should have just let him decided when he was ready...but that is easy to say on this side of things!
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