Last week, I was chatting with a friend at the park about her upcoming second baby when she asked me to weigh in on whether to try and potty-train her first child who is about to turn two. Yes! I said, that’s the perfect time to potty-train. I gushed enthusiastically about how great it is to potty-train early, and then told her that I had half a blog post drafted about our experience early-potty-training. Oh send it to me, she said.
So I dug it out and cleaned it up a bit for her and thought I might as well share it here. It’s been long enough since we had a nearly two year old potty-training that I had forgotten a few details, and it seems a little bit funny to be revisiting it now since my kids are so far past that stage. I am keeping the images and names of the kids to a minimum on this post to keep a smidge more privacy for my now bigger kids. Fortunately, we have a homemade tiny stuffed animal potty for just this occasion.
Potty-training can seem pretty daunting when you undertake it, and it helps to have a bit of encouragement. I really appreciated getting to read about other people’s experiences when I was in the thick of it. And based on how often friends and occasionally near strangers ask me about it, I think other moms feel similarly.
Every kid and family is different, and you can get a pretty wide range of advice on when and how to undertake the whole endeavor. We did early potty-training, and it worked great for us. I have really awesome mom friends who waited a lot longer, and they cannot imagine trying to potty-train before two. I, on the other hand, cannot imagine trying to potty-train a stubborn three year old! Most people are comfortable and recommend starting at the age they successfully trained their kids because it what worked for them. And usually, it does all work out: by kindergarten most parents and kids have figured it out. In the end, do your research on methodologies, poll your people, and be confident that your kid will get it, and that you all will survive the process.
If you’re interested in my very subjective early potty-training experience, read on for my 8 biggest pieces of advice. Otherwise, thanks for reading my blog, and go and get yourself a cup of coffee and enjoy your currently potty-training free life!
1. Read Jamie Glowacki’s book
: O Crap Potty Training: Everything Modern Parents Need to Know to Do it Once and Do it Right. Read it a couple weeks before you want to start. The cliff notes version is below, but trust me, read the whole book. I even got my husband Evan to skim-read this one, and he verifies that it was indeed worth it.
- When to start: Around age 2 (anywhere from 20 to 30 months old, but 23 – 26 months is the easiest) beginning over a long 3-day weekend.
- Stage One: naked days at home. When you see your child needing to go potty, or more likely starting to go potty, get them to the potty. Don’t ask if they need to go (they’ll say no); either tell them it’s time to go or race them to the potty. Accidents are learning: say pee doesn’t go on the floor, and have them help clean it up. When they make it to the potty successfully, celebrate in a way that feels authentic to you and your parenting style: “Yay! You did it!”
- Stage Two: pants, but no underwear at home. Once naked pottying is going well, add pants, but no underwear. Make sure they are pants the kid can actually pull down (or “push” down a verb that kids get more than the expression “pull down”) easily. Or help them with their pants if they ask for it.
- Stage Three: pants, but no underwear, on short trips out of the house. Practice going potty before you leave, and using the bathroom outside of the house while you’re out. Snowpants are not an ideal situation here, so timing the whole process not in the dead of winter can help (it also helps with a naked kid not having to be in a cold house).
For some kids, each stage takes a day, for others like our first kid, stage one took almost 10 days. Jamie Glowacki has helped a lot of families potty-train and the whole book is funny and filled with great advice and encouragement. (And, obviously by the title of book, she has a bit of a potty mouth.)
2. Extra Patience and Resources for Kids Under Two:
If your kid is not yet two, I’d also recommend reading about really young toilet learning, because it can take longer than three days. The Montessori approach to toilet training can be a lot more process oriented and slow paced for older one-year-olds. (They pee on the floor, they clean it up, they get a new pair of underwear on. My favorite Montessori blog post on toilet learning is from Howwemontessori.com.) Or here is a post from a family following Jamie Glowacki’s approach I I found encouraging when a few days into potty-training our first:betterjuntos. I also found the Oh Crap! Potty Training Unofficial Book Club Facebook Group helpful and Jamie Glowacki’s Youtube channel videos.
For our experience with a 20 month old, here’s an excerpt from an email I wrote to a friend a few years ago when she was about to start:
If I could go back and give myself a pep talk about potty-training it would go something along the lines of: it’s going to be very slow, meaning there is going to be a lot of pee on the floor, but that doesn’t mean anyone is doing anything wrong: you’re doing it fine, he’s doing it fine. In six months, a couple of weeks of cleaning up pee is not going to seem like a big deal.
About mid-afternoon of the first day he happened to pee on the potty and we cheered and then he looked at me and said “again.” I realized he thought I was the one who could make his pee come out…and I also realized that we were going to be doing this for a while.
Then, in addition to majorly chilling out (and tuning down that Enneagram #1 critic voice about needing to do everything the right way right now), I’d also tell myself every few days to rotate through all the tips and tricks. Things that didn’t seem to make much difference day 2, worked on day 7.
For example, my most enduring memory of those early potty-training days with our son (again, it took a lot more like 10 days than 3 for him to start to “get it”) was after about a week of basically only catching pees when he’d first wake up from sleep, and having a child sit on the potty refusing to go for like 20 or 30 minutes, multiple times a day. I started washing his feet. One of the tips in the book was trying to use warm water to get a child to calm down and let go. And so I was home by myself bathing his feet in a mixing bowl of warm water, and I thought what a picture of serving this little person. It was a sweet moment, like our own little Maundy Thursday foot washing service.
Another fun moment was when his older cousin came over (she would have been 3 and a few months at the time) and modeled peeing on the potty for him outside as they played. She got way into it, and made herself pee a tiny bit like every 10 minutes. It was very funny.
Or I made his stuffed animals a tiny potty for them to practice noticing and needing to go potty. They still play with that tiny stuffy’s potty.
But what finally made the connection for him was having a pee-pee race. Again, we had tried it the first day or two, but it didn’t work then, but then about day 10 it clicked. That kid still loves a good race of any kind.
3. The Gear: Tiny potties.
Potty-training gear we’ve found to be absolutely essential are a stand alone at home Summer little potty, a Potette travel potty with reusable insert, and an at home Bjorn toilet insert with step stool (we use the squatty potty and by “we” I mean me, because my husband loathes our squatty potty in our tiny bathroom and it’s an act of grumbling love for me that we have it). My brother has the fancy built in toddler seat in his actual toilet seat. I think this is especially great for girls. If you have a very small kid, the cheapest Ikea Lillia potty is small enough for their little legs to sit on the floor comfortably.
If you have a kid who is prone to pooping a lot away from home, then getting more of the disposable inserts for your travel potty wouldn’t be a bad idea (although they are basically a plastic bag with an absorbent layer to them, so you could make your own with a plastic grocery bag and some paper towels) or our approach of ziplock backs, wet wipes, and hand sanitizer spray.
To clean up accidents at dirty little potties I have LOVED the force of nature spray. It’s electrolyzed water, which turns a little packet of vinegar and salt that you dump into water into Hypochlorous acid and Sodium hydroxide which is a disinfectant like bleach plus a detergent. It’s pricey to buy the starter kit, but you could really clean your whole house with that and a bit of soap. Recently, our awesome water filter company made their own version called Sanitru, so you could check the prices between them and see who is currently the better deal. (For a great detergent, I also really like Branch Basics. I think their concentrates are even better than regular castile Dr. Bronner’s soap.)
We also keep a basket-full of pre-fold diapers out to soak up accidents, because they’re very absorbent. I’m sure paper towels or old hand towels would work well too 🙂 Cleaning up pee becomes not a big deal. I didn’t usually disinfect a pee accident on a hard surface, just wiped it away. We did roll up our rugs and put towels on the couch. I think it helped me be more relaxed and feel like I was doing something. Also a pre-fold (or a hand towel) underneath the dinner table makes mid-meal accidents way less dramatic.
Other tricks of the trade involve always carrying two extra pairs of pants in a wet bag along with the travel potty in the diaper bag instead of diapers. And in carseats and when eating at someone else’s house, a combination of a pre-fold and a Kushies Baby Deluxe Change Pad was great at containing a pee accident before it became a big clean up project.
4. A Word on Potty Training Friendly Clothing
The other gear-related aspect of potty training, especially at 20 months is the clothes. For us, dropping cloth diapers to going commando meant that waist bands that previously fit suddenly got too big. Also, all the sweet zip-up-footie jammies were theoretically not good for encouraging independent pottying, so I wished that someone had told me that starting at 2T, all pajamas should be two-piece. Same thing for the snap shirts / onesies: they’ve got to go.
For girls, just wearing dresses and skirts for some of early stage one naked days would be pretty easy. For our son, we had him in way over-sized t-shirts for when we needed to be in the back yard, but didn’t want a naked boy outside (we did this in August when it was hot out). But then a few months later, we kept him in these cute 2T training underwear that technically fit him but were way too hard for him to pull up himself (probably partially why he didn’t want to do a lot of independent dressing ). Moral of the story: things should not be falling down, but basically be as loose as possible.
5. Poop & Nighttime Training.
Both of my kids wore nighttime diapers and gradually trained themselves for nighttime after six months to a year without any effort on our part. In Glowacki’s book, she says this happens about 30% of the time, so I think we got lucky. Read her book for nighttime advice. Nap wise, I put them in a diaper for a week or two, and then cleaned up probably four accidents total, but did have them pee right after they woke up from nap (and morning!).
Poop wise, we also had not too much trouble; most of the learning was around pee. But again, for other kids, it’s a big deal, so read that chapter on poop. I found that our kids would often have to go pee like three times within an hour when they had to go poop (or before they were reliable, they’d have a pee accident right after going pee) and/or they’d be crazy and really easily frustrated right before they’d pooped. Both were signs that they needed to poop (I mean the second one was often only in retrospect. Unfortunately, not every crazy toddler mood can be solved with a poop.) Also, we tried fairly early, after a month or two, to get our kids to poop on the big adult potty. The kids did great with it as long as they had their kids potty on the top of the seat. That was very helpful in the clean up department.
6. Training the Second Child.
It was easier with the second one, and we waited until she was just a tiny bit older, 23 months, so that helped. For the most part, I was much more laid back. I didn’t strip the house of rugs, or cover all the couches with towels, or watch every you-tube video that Jamie Glowacki put out during nap time. And little sister had been watching brother use the little potty from day one, and when it was convenient to add her into the potty routine before bed or before getting dressed in the morning, she’d use the potty too, even before we started officially potty training.
She was also more verbal at 23 months, so she could say “potty,” and push her own pants down a lot sooner than her brother at 20 months did. She wasn’t as quick to pick up on the need to poop though, and we had about three weeks where poop ended up in pants because we couldn’t get her to the potty in time. But then without us really doing anything, she got it. (See this is what happens: when you write about this years later, at the time it probably seemed interminably long and concerning, but I had completely forgotten that even happened until I went back and read my notes!)
For a long time though, she was a mid-morning pooper, so we’ve had to deal with pooping in the middle of walks a lot. I just started to carry some quart sized slider zip lock bags, wet wipes, and spray hand sanitizer with us. It’s really not much different than picking up dog poop or dealing with a poopy diaper out and about.
7. A Couple Regrets.
The routine of adding another toddler into the potty mix was hardly conscious thought. This had some downsides since I was used to simply telling our older toddler that we can’t leave until he pees, which works great for him at age four. But it did not work on day four of a 23 month old potty-training when I declared that we weren’t going to leave the house until she peed, and then we sat on the potty for 90 minutes, with many tears (and books, and tiny breaks) waiting for her to pee. That power struggle did not end well for me. I needed the reminder that accidents are part of the learning process and sometimes it’s just not worth the fight, and 5 minutes is long enough of a show down.
My other big regret from when our first child was potty training is that we had some dear DC friends who were camping at Devil’s Lake three days into potty training, and instead of just pausing and going out to see them, we canceled the trip because he was nowhere near ready for a 2 1/2 hour car ride. I’m still sad we didn’t get to see them.
So don’t schedule any big trips right away, or miss seeing out of town dear friends because you’re afraid of messing up potty training. I mean in the end, potty training is pretty much just not putting a diaper on your kid and together figuring out a way to get him or her to the potty. (Simple but not easy!) It was a lot of gradual learning to trust each other.
8. Confidence and Patience.
Overall, I think trusting that your kid can do it, even if it takes a couple of weeks, is the biggest key. Take off the diapers, trust the learning process which involves a few messes, and take joy in teaching your child a new skill patiently and confidently. You can do it! Oh and read Jamie Glowacki’s book: O Crap Potty Training: Everything Modern Parents Need to Know to Do it Once and Do it Right!
Have you attempted early potty training? What is your best advice or biggest take away?
*Note* This post contains Amazon affiliate links, which means if you were to buy a book or a tiny potty from amazon.com, I’d get a tiny commission at no cost to you. Thanks for supporting Stories & Thyme!*