I make no claims to be any kind of expert in potty training, but I realised 2nd time round, that successful, stress free potty training really depends on one very important thing...knowing yourself! I hear you saying 'huh? What does that have to do with anything?!' Well in truth it has alot to do with most things on the journey of parenthood. See I am one of those moms who read all the books and articles and websites on various parenting-related matters and there are always opposing views and conflicting ideas about parenting; potty training being one of them. And what I've come to realise is that none of them are wrong; because all the different methods have both worked and failed. And when you examine each method and the reasons for them either working or failing, you will find the main difference is of course that the subjects, or in this case the parent and child is different. The key really is to have a very clear idea of your own strengths and weaknesses and apply them to the case. So if you are a hyper patient mom, who has the mental and physical endurance to put your child on the toilet every 15 minutes and the emotional patience to deal with accidents then by all means start the potty training process whenever you are ready. On the other hand, if like me you are under no delusions about your tethered and sometimes somewhat non-existent span of patience, and you have an averse reaction to 'accidents' then the key really is to take the lead from your child. I learned from my experience with Bilaal that I did not handle the whole potty training period very well, which had a negative impact on him, so I gave up and put him back on the nappy till one day he just started asking to use the toilet and then I knew he was ready. Of course going to school also plays a huge influence.
So this time with Sumayah I was a little more wise. As someone commented on one of fellow blogger Margot's posts: 'I'm sure it will sort itself out by the time they reach college'. I loved this comment and that's exactly the approach I will be taking. What's the rush? Eventually the kid will use the loo, sleep through the night, etc. If they are developing normally, the best thing we can do as parents is provide as stress free an environment as possible to foster that development. So the approach I took with Sumayah was to gradually introduce the idea of using the toilet, first by putting her on the toilet before bath time and encouraging her to tell me when she wanted to wee. I also always spoke about using the toilet everytime I changed her nappy. I tried using pull-ups for a while, but these proved to make nappy changing more difficult when she made a nr.2 so I abandoned that idea. There were a few toilet successes during this time and she just loved the idea of throwing water on her parts after 'using the toilet'. This went on for about 3 months when she started school. One thing I would definately advise is that potty training should not happen when there are big changes occuring in your child's life. For example, knowing that Sumayah was starting school this year I deliberately delayed official potty training till after I was happy that she was settled in school. I was hoping we could get the potty training well under way before baby nr.3 arrives, but would have been quite happy to delay it till after if I thought she wasn't ready. Changes like these are stressful to kids and will almost sure cause them to regress. Fortunately she was very ready and after a week of being settled in school and loving it, the potty training just occured naturally. I would send her to school in nappies and when I fetched her she wasn't wearing any. The teacher said she was starting to ask to go to the toilet and there were no accidents yet. But I didn't just jump in there and expect full compliance at home too, so I put a nappy back on when we got home, but asked her regularly if she wanted to go, and put her on the toilet everytime she had something to drink. I also told her that at the weekend we would go buy her some special pretty panties and constantly spoke to her about how she was going to wear big girl panties and how exciting it all was. So that's exactly what we did. The saturday we bought her pretty panties and when we got home she was very excited to wear them. I admit I was a bit apprehensive that she wasn't quite ready, but I didn't want to dampen her enthusiasm so off went the nappies. And what do you know, we went 4 straight days wearing panties and no accidents. I even braved the shops with panties on! Later that week there were about 3 accidents, 2 of them disgusting nr.2s, but these were all related to tantrum episodes that were occuring at the time. So far she has been off the nappy during the day time for 2 weeks now and completely asks to go out of her own now. I continued to put the nappy on at night though. As with Bilaal, I will wait to see dry nappies in the morning for at least a continuous week before leaving the nappy off. This week she surprised me by having 3 dry nights and asking to use the toilet when she woke in the morning. So we are well on our way to being a nappy free household... Well at least until baby arrives which could be any time within the next 6 weeks! Watch this space!
0 comments:
Post a Comment