The Path to the Potty

Our family is entering the world of potty training for the third time.  

As our youngest child approaches the age of three, and it seems an appropriate time to begin the process with him, I have been trying to remember the strategies we used with our two older boys.

Our oldest son was extremely resistant to using the potty.  We had to resort to tricks like “Help me find the Thomas sticker in the bathroom!” to even get him to a potty, and then all manner of bribery and rewards and sticker charts to get him to actually go.  He was so obstinate about pooping in the potty that I ended up buying a bag full of one-dollar toys at Target and rewarding him with one each time he pooped.  Fortunately, we were able to phase out the rewards, and once he finally relented, he never had an accident.  

Our second child was also resistant to using the potty, though not in such an extreme manner, but again, once he made the switch, he never had an accident.

We've recently had some indicators that our third child might be ready for potty training.  He has been waking up with a dry diaper in the morning, knows how to make pee come out when we sit him on the potty, and is demonstrating other “signs of readiness."

But it is not only the child who must be ready.  Potty training is an undertaking that the parents must also be ready for, both mentally and physically, as it is a messy job that requires large amounts of dedication, attention, and vigilance.  I finally started feeling ready to take on the challenge, as I am weary of seven years of wiping poop off bottoms, dealing with unwieldy boxes of diapers and wipes from Costco, and hauling out stinky diaper trash.

I assumed that potty training would be a snap with Carter, given his birth order.  I had heard miraculous stories of children simply deciding one day that they wanted to be like their older siblings, refusing to wear diapers any longer, and potty training themselves overnight.  The stories have all, of course, been about girls, but I was hoping, naively, that the same might hold true for us.  

I also thought the temperament of our two-year-old would make potty training easier.  Carter is the closest thing we have to a compliant child.  He is generally happy, eager to please, and is content to go along with whatever is happening around him.  He is quite amenable to using the potty when we ask, so I thought it would be a snap to put him in some exciting new underwear, take him to the potty at regular intervals, and boom!  He would be potty trained.  I believed that his cheerful compliance, combined with the modeling of his older brothers, and his parents being seasoned veterans of potty training, would make the process straight-forward and easy.  

This has not been the case.

The first time I tried putting Carter in his special new underpants, he peed through three pairs in about ten minutes - specifically, his "Finding Nemo," "The Incredibles," and "Cars" underpants.  He seems to be on the “empty your bladder whenever anything is in it” plan, regardless of what he is wearing.  So, while he loves his little potty and is happy to pee in it, he is also happy to pee in his underpants, his pull-up, his diaper, his pants, and on any available surface.  He feels no regret, no shame, no sense that he should have done something differently.  

He merely calls out cheerfully, “Mama!  Pee on the floor [alternatively, insert chair, couch, rug, bed, or any other surface in our house here]!”, as though he has no idea how it got there and merely wants to point it out to me.

At preschool, Carter is completely unperturbed when he gets his clothes soaking wet from washing his hands too vigorously, or playing at the water table, or being out in the rain, or tromping through dew-covered grass.  His drenched clothing doesn’t bother him in the slightest, and it is always a teacher who has to point out to him that he is wet and needs a change of clothes.  This lack of sensory sensitivity to wetness does not help our potty training cause.

Finally, I am finding that I have not been able to dedicate the same level of energy and vigilance to the cause as I did with the first two boys.  In our family, the distractions and demands of family life increased exponentially rather than linearly when we went from two to three children.  I also began working part time after we had our third child.  So, while I was able to dedicate a majority of my attention to the first child’s potty training, and perhaps half of my attention for the second, I estimate that I currently have about 3% available for the third.  Three percent potty training attention for a child who 100% does not care if he pees in his pants is not an ideal combination.

I am realizing that we are going to have to take a completely different approach with our youngest child, despite our previous experience with potty training.  We are aiming for the same destination as the one we reached with the first two boys, but we need to take a new path to get there.

I’m finding this to be true of many aspects of parenting.  Certainly, some aspects of parenting are similar, and easier, the second or third time around.  I had more confidence, more realistic expectations, more trust in my own intuition, more a sense of my parenting style and values, after having had my first son.  But the boys are each so unique, with their own personalities, temperaments, and love languages, and it seems as though our parenting is most effective, most rich, when our approach is adjusted for each of them.  How we play with, discipline, teach, express our love, and nurture each of the boys is specific to each one of them, sometimes in subtle ways, and sometimes in very obvious ways.

At times, I am discouraged by this reality.  It seems like an awful lot of work that I didn’t know I was signing up for, having to learn three different ways to deal with three different children across nearly all aspects of parenting.  But I try to think of it as my specialized education, that I am becoming the leading expert on each of my boys.  It's a challenge, but also a special privilege, an honorable title that only I can claim.