Adventures in Potty Training

Jack will be 4 next week.  Four years.  The average length of time to get through college.  A Presidential term. You can get a lot accomplished in 4 years.  However, for my darling little boy, using the potty with any level of reliability is not one of them.

 

There is a certain level of embarrassment when I tell people that Jack is still using diapers at the ripe old age of three.  Yet I know that it could be worse.  At three-years-old, I can use the standard excuses of “Boys train later.” or “He’s just a late trainer.”  However, once he crosses over and becomes a 4 year old in diapers, all excuses will fail me and I will be left with a big diaper pail full of failure.  Perhaps this will be a self-imposed failure, but the stink will be the same.

 

I feel like I’ve tried every possible technique to get this child to use the Big Boy Potty.  We’ve done rewards, but then the focus becomes the reward and not the accomplishment.  We’ve tried allowing him to wear underwear so that he will know when he is wet, but Jack will realize he is wet and just go with it.  We have a potty song, a sticker chart, and a special potty chair.  And yet the only time we had success giving up the diapers was when Jack tried to pee in anything that wasn’t a potty.  He peed in shoes, on chairs, on the grass, and in the tub.  At least it wasn’t in the diaper.  (See I can look for the positive.)

 

When we were going through potty training with Nicholas, my husband pointed out that very few men walk down the isle not knowing how to use the facilities.  And knowing Jack, it is just a matter of him making up his mind that he is going to be a potty-trained boy.  For now, I have instituted the rule that if you pee on yourself, you clean yourself up.  I’ll got to the potty, but I will not change wet pull-ups* on big boys.  Jack doesn’t like this rule and I am hoping that it will help him realize that stopping to go to the bathroom is a lot faster than stopping to change a wet diaper.

 

* I’ve heard all the arguments against using pull-ups, but I can only clean the carpet and the couch cushions so many times.  Plus, I refuse to live in a litter box.

Comments

[Fairion]

Just a thought. There is a little urinal that parents of boys can get just like a regular potty seat that helps some boys make the leap to staying dry. He may like it enough to want to switch.