CHAPTER 5

Ditch the Diapers! The How-To

So, you’ve done your mental prep. Your head is screwed on tight.

You’ve cleared your calendars and you are ready to ditch the diapers.
Remember the timeline. We are taking your child’s awareness
from Clueless to I Peed to I’m Peeing to I Have to Go Pee.
This timeline is potty training in a nutshell. That’s it!
(Hahahaha!)
I want you to think of potty training as being made up of blocks of
learning. I’m going to call them just that: blocks or phases. No matter
where you are starting from, you need to think of the potty training
process as a tower of blocks that you are building. If one block is not
learned properly, the tower will be unstable and will tumble.
Thinking in this way makes potty training so much more
approachable. Breaking potty training down into blocks like this will
also give you a really good idea of where and when things went wrong
if there are any struggles later on. Parents who don’t break potty
training into blocks and have struggles often don’t know where it
went wrong. With the block approach, you can say something like,
“Oh! He had block one down pat. It was only when we moved to
block two that he started struggling.” This is extremely helpful for
troubleshooting. Because our kids aren’t robots, there are all kinds of