potty training, “I don’t know what happened! It was totally clicking.
She HAD it. She was sitting and peeing and pooping. Now, all of a
sudden, she won’t sit on the potty when I prompt her and she’s having
accidents all over the place. HELP!”
When you are potty training, there comes a time when you
actually have to hand control over to your child. Usually, this is
within the first week. A really, really good sign that your child wants
you out of her business is when she “had it” and all of a sudden resists
or starts to have tons of accidents.
The learning phase of anything sucks. No one wants to “be
learning”; we like to “have learned.”
This is a catch-22, and it’s scary as hell. You need to give control
over to her, and she’s not yet proven she can handle it. Failing to turn
over control at the right time is a classic mistake in potty training—
because your child isn’t self-initiating and going on her own, you
figure you have to keep at her.
In reality, what you need to do is give her room to make the right
choice for herself. If you are constantly at her—watching, hovering,
trying to help—she has no room to make her potty use her own. Now,
this doesn’t mean you leave it totally up to her. Prompting is going to
be necessary for a bit longer. You must prompt without
overprompting, which sounds awfully Yoda-ish, but it’s true.
Here’s the trick: toss the prompts out there with as little energy as
possible. Something like, “I can see you have to pee. There’s your
potty.” Then drop the matter. Walk away and let it go, mentally
and/or physically. Now she can make her own choice, which means
there’s nothing to resist. If you don’t care, there’s nothing for her to
fight. I mean, of course you care, but you have to give your child the
barry
(Barry)
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