This is a real story, from a real person, ME!

I have two boys, ages 5 and 3 now.  They were BOTH super easy to potty train, and we did it in ONE day.

I’m not kidding you.  With our first son, we planned for it, and then on one Saturday morning, we started, and by Saturday night he was out of his diaper, and we never put a diaper on him again.

Nick was 2 and a half when we potty trained.  Matthew was also about 2 and a half when we potty trained him, also.  Same story.  Woke up one morning, and said ‘This is going to be the last day Matthew wears a diaper.’ And it was.

Here’s what we did!

The first thing to make sure of is that your child is showing all the correct signs that they’re ready to be potty trained.  I believe that if you force a child who isn’t ready to be potty trained you’ll just set your progress back even further than if you wait until they’re ready.  I think there are reports and studies about potty training that say this bodily function is one of only a very few things in a toddler’s life that they can control, and if they’re not ready to give up that control, they’ll exploit it to make the experience miserable for you and for them.  It won’t be pleasant if you try and potty train them before they’re ready.  What are the signs?

1.  Make sure they’re able to follow and obey simple commands like “Come here” or “Stand here”

2.  Be sure they are able to pull their pants down by them selves.

3.  They should be waking up from their nighttime sleep with a dry diaper.

I think that’s pretty much it.  If they can do these things, I think you’re pretty much ready to go for it!

We purchased a doll that goes potty to show our children how a person goes potty and to show the kids that when the pants of the doll are dry, we’re very pleased and make a big deal about the dry pants.  I think it’s more important to positively reinforce dry pants than to negatively reinforce wet pants.  We definitely focused more on staying dry as opposed to avoiding being wet.  Stay focused on the goal and not the behavior that you’re trying to eliminate.

We let our son pick a name for the doll so it would develop a bit of an attachment to it.  We spent about an hour showing our son how the doll had dry pants and we would say things like “Wow, look at Mike, he’s got dry pants!  He’s such a big boy keeping his pants dry!”  Then occasionally, we would say “Hey!  Mike has to go potty!  Hurry, lets take Mike to the potty.”  Then we would deliberately go through all the necessary steps to go potty.  First we actually walk (or run) to the potty.  Then we would have our son help “Mike” pull his pants down, and then Mike (who had a small squeeze bottle inside) would actually go potty.  Then we help Mike pull his pants up, flush the potty, and wash his hands.

I think that having our son “help” Mike with what to do, was key part of getting everything mentally straight with our son.

All the while we are doing this, we’re loading our son up on water, and juice.  I would recommend that you stay away from juice, or at lease seriously dilute it.  It turned out ok for us, but it will give most children diarrhea.

Another important thing to do is to make sure you relate the doll’s dry pants to your child’s pants.  We would always check “Mike’s” pants, and then immediately check our son’s pants and make a big deal about them being dry.

When he would start to go potty, we would help him hurry to the potty, help him take his pants down, and help him “aim” properly.  If we managed to help him keep his pants dry, we would praise him a lot and tell him what a good job he did with keeping his pants dry.

If he didn’t make it to the potty, we would encourage him to try and keep his pants dry next time.  And here’s an IMPORTANT step when our child didn’t keep his pants dry.  “Rehearse” the episode three or four times, or as many times as you can without inducing a meltdown.  Start at the place where the child was when they first noticed they had to go potty, help them hurry to the potty, help them pull their pants down, and help them up onto their step stool or whatever.  Do this several times, and always encourage the dry pants.

For us, I think the key to success was several things:

1.  BE sure they’re ready.  Don’t force it if they’re not ready

2.  Be patient and encouraging.  Don’t yell at them or reprimand them.  This is new and intimidating for them, and they have 100% control over this aspect of their life.  If they decide they don’t want to be potty trained, no amount of training will work.  So be sure to keep it positive, fun, and encouraging.

3.  Be consistent.  Don’t start the project if you’re not mentally ready, or if you don’t have the whole day to dedicate to it.

For us it was totally worth it, and it worked really well.  I think when we did our second child, we even took our older one to his grandparents for the day so we would not be distracted.

We used a book called “Potty Training in a Day” and I would highly recommend that you pick up a copy.  It really worked for us.  And it didn’t just work one time, we were successful with it twice!!!

Check out our next article about how we got both our kids to sleep through the night by 6 WEEKS!!!  Wow .. I would have gone insane without this!

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