good thing. It can settle her and make the next go-around calmer.
She won one, you get to win one. I know that sounds odd, but it’s
true.
As a side note, perhaps you are not getting resistance, just utter
cluelessness from your child, and wonder whether a Reset is
warranted. In such a case, you have to be the judge. Utter
cluelessness for more than a week is something I have never seen in a
child over twenty-four months of age. I’ve seen kids not want to deal
with the potty or pretend it doesn’t exist, but that’s not cluelessness.
That’s passive resistance and should be worked through. We’ll talk
about kids younger than twenty-four months in a minute.
So how do you handle a Reset?
First, you rediaper. I’d prefer you do this at night before bed and
just continue doing so in the morning. The one thing I’d like you to
avoid is returning to diapers in the middle of a fit of resistance. She’s
screaming and you say, “Fine! Put a diaper on!” This is her “winning”
(in a very different way than the good kind of “winning” I mentioned
a few paragraphs ago), and it will send the wrong message.
The message we want to send—and you can use these exact words
—is, “You are not using the potty properly, so we are going to use a
diaper again so we can all calm down.” This isn’t meant as
punishment or giving in. This is merely to regroup.
Second, you put away the potty chair, and you don’t say boo about
potty training. You will mostly likely get one of the following
reactions:
- Nothing. No mention of it, and you actually can sense relief in your child.
- Your child asks about it but doesn’t ask to use it. Use that statement above and
then change the subject. This is not the time to lecture about her misuse of the