Oh Crap! Potty Training

These two little connections are the biggest.
Making these connections is not hard physically. This is a
turnaround in your head. It’s the slightest adjustment that will make
this so much easier. When I met Gwen I think we went around her
philosophy for days. She didn’t want to say anything negative about
the potty. She didn’t want to do naked day. She really thought her
twenty-two-month-old daughter would, any day, turn around and
potty herself. I pointed out that Gwen had come to me, so clearly she
thought she needed help in her daughter’s completion. She did,
indeed . . . but she had such a hard time, thinking all her work of
ECing was going to waste.
In fact, she was pissed at EC. If a child can be potty trained in
under a week, why’d she waste all this time trying to help her child
connect the dots with EC? Maybe you’re feeling something similar. I
know a lot of people do. I encouraged Gwen to think of all the
positives. Not clogging the planet with crappy diapers, having an
incredible bond with her daughter. Mostly, the greatest thing is that
she already knew her daughter’s signals. This is incredibly hard for
some moms who’ve diapered to figure out. They haven’t “kept track,”
so to speak, and they are starting from ground zero. From diaper
moms I almost always hear, “She didn’t show any sign she was going
to pee.” Now, you, as an ECer, know better. So you do have some
advantages.
Another pitfall is when your child is taking longer than average. I
had one former client, Jill, who flipped her lid. On “my clock” she
was on her fourth day of potty training. But because she had basically
done Diaper-free Time for six months, she felt like she’d been potty
training for six months and four days. So it was very frustrating to