For some children it comes naturally, for others it is still a challenge. What should you do as a parent to promote toilet training for your little one or do you just do nothing at all?
There are all kinds of advice and ideas about potty training children. It is said that children will naturally become toilet trained when their bodies are ready. Others say that you should encourage it and come up with different reward systems.
Like everything in parenting, there is no single panacea or parenting advice that applies to all children. And it is also impossible to fully influence it as a parent, because there is another important person involved in this story: your child himself. What do we know and what can help in how you can tackle potty training? Becoming toilet trained consists not only of a physical but also of a (cultural) psychological process. Part of the psychological process is learning our way of going to the toilet. In our culture we have a seated toilet (and the men often urinate to the annoyance of some women, but we are not talking about that now…). The toilet is a separate room in the house where everyone goes when they have to pee or defecate. Usually you just sit there with the door closed. You pull your pants down, sit down and afterwards you wipe yourself with a toilet paper and you continue. Your poo or pee disappears, we rarely wonder where. You wash your hands and Klaas is done.
This makes a lot of sense to all of us, but if a child doesn't see or experience this, how is he supposed to know it works that way? Every child doesn't know any better, because that's how it goes from birth than that he wears a diaper almost 24 hours a day and puts his pee or poo in it whenever he wants, after which it disappears in the garbage can. And that makes sense to him. To make going to the toilet as natural and enjoyable as possible, it's not a bad idea to make it natural for a child as early as possible.
If you do not do this, children may have difficulty going to the toilet, depending on age, character and temperament. The reason for this may differ from child to child. For example, the idea of his pee or poop safely in the garbage can be experienced as pleasant instead of just seeing it disappear into a hole in the toilet. Or is the fact that you suddenly have to pee or defecate with your buttocks exposed (brr, that feels cold) very strange. But it could also be that they just have too many other things on their mind to make time for potty training. It is difficult to determine exactly what goes on in those heads when a child does not want to be potty trained quickly, but there are so many logical reasons. Reasons you take for granted by going to the toilet from an early age can occur. A child who can sit and walk on their own can already get acquainted with a potty or the toilet. At this age, they also find everything interesting and fun. And that intrinsic motivation makes everything easier!
But is a child of, say, 1 year old already physically capable of being potty trained? This is where we come to the physical process of toilet training. To be potty trained your body has to be able to do everything. The sphincters must work properly and be able to be controlled. In addition, the signals of the body must be recognized. Those are all things a child needs to learn, just like anything else they learn.
Controlling the muscles is partly something the body needs time to do. You don't force that. You can make your child aware of what is happening in the body. That before you have to pee or defecate, you feel something happen in your stomach, for example. Children can then experience this. Only when they realize this, they can recognize the signals and do something with them. This too is a process.
If you make this process fun for children and something that is part of it (so at least once a day) then it will "automatically" be fine. This also applies if you started potty training a little later. Your child often has to deal with more distractions, both internally (the no-phase for example ;-)) and externally. Persistence is the motto, just trust it: every child is toilet trained, so you will be fine too!
Sometimes there is something in the body that makes potty training more difficult. If you have any doubts about this, you can always talk to your GP or the nurse at the CJG.
Greetings,
Shirley
