Oh Crap! Potty Training

there’s your potty.” You must leave room for him to make the good
decision himself. This could take a day or two, so be patient. You want
to dance along the delicate line between prompting and backing off.
Now, for most parents, that’s going to be enough. Time after time,
I’ve seen moms shocked at how quickly and easily it went with a
former Potty Monster. Often, I really think it’s a matter of (a) the
consistency and (b) going back and learning. If a kid doesn’t “get” all
the components of a process (like potty training), they tend to stop
caring. I call it the “inner f**k it.” Which is basically them saying, “I
suck at this, so I’m not going to try.” Our kids want to do well. They
want to do the right thing. We have to believe that. A lot of
resistance in the older kid is because they haven’t learned something
quite the right way.
You see this same attitude coming from the kid who’s kind of the
punk in school. He slouches, doesn’t pay attention, is the class clown.
It’s usually this kid who, it turns out, never learned to read or has a
learning disorder. We want to assume your child is just missing a
component.
Now you might start at the beginning, make it through a few days,
and everything seems okay. Then you go back to daily life and—
whoops!—poop in the pants again. I highly suggest using a small,
immediate consequence. Not as punishment, but more to find out if
your child can use the potty properly if motivated to do so. We need
to know if this is him not caring or being lazy about it or if this is
something he can’t control. It becomes very clear whether or not he
can do what we’re asking when we add in an external motivator. The
consequence should be something that matters to your child but