Potty Training Girls | Potty Training Boys | Potty Training For Parents

One of the hardest part for parents of toddlers and preschoolers is the teaching of potty training. No parent quite knows what the correct way, or the fastest way is to teach their young child how to give up the pull-up or training pants and graduate on to using the toliet. Potty training girls and boys is not an easy task. Potty training takes patience, will power, and time. That's just for the parents. Imagine for the child how much work it is to learn how to control their body and make the connection between the feeling of having to go potty and actually making it all the way to the toliet. Most kids in the potty training stages are still just trying to figure out how to get their socks on.

Potty Training girls and boys can be done fast. Actually it can easily take a weekend or just a week. But on a childs time schedule for potty training. Not the parents. I learned this from my daughter.

She had always done things so early. As soon as she was ready, she just did it. When she was ready to give up the bottle, there was no fuss when it was taken away. Many things in her life when it was time, just happened perfectly. So imagine a mothers dissapointment when I wanted her to be potty trained and she would continue to use her pull-up anyway.

She wasn't ready. She was on her schedule. I realized this when she stopped having bowel movements in her pull-up. One day they just stopped. No more poop in the diaper. After that she had maybe 2 or 3 accidents but that was it. We were still at a loss for pee. For months she continued despite putting underwear on all day. There would be accidents after accidents. I wanted her to be ready so to me it was taking forever. But the day I sent her to daycare with just underwear and she told me she was ready to be a big girl, everything changed. She was done with pull-ups during the day. She had just 2 accidents in the next 3 weeks. She was potty training fast. Fast for her, and I realized later fast for me.

At 3 and 4 years old our children are smart enough that when they put all the pieces together and really decided that they are ready, things just go smoothly. As parents we sometimes feel that a child should be potty training at 2 years old. I was the same. I felt I failed. I didn't fail at potty training, I failed to realize that my daughter is a person and she is on her own time schedule. I can encourage her and provide her the tools to potty training success. But my potty training girl had to decide for herself that it was time. That she had control of her body and that she was ready.   

There are potty training DVD's, potty training books, even potty training toys out there. You name it there's something out there to help with potty training girls and boys. These are a wonderful way to get the idea of potty training planted in a child's head. We were big fans of the ELMO Potty Time DVD and Elmo Potty Time Book with flushing sounds. They didn't potty train my daughter but they got her talking about it with me.

These tools are visual and audio ways for children to get comfortable and familiar with potty training at their level of understanding. Bring them into the home and then let your child move at his or her pace.

Let them pick out their potty chair. My daughter had both the potty seat and the potty chair. She used both depending on her mood. I preferred the potty seat only because there was little clean-up but she liked be down on the ground on her potty chair and not having her legs dangling off the toilet.

Ask your child if they have any questions. Potty Training can be a scary concept for some young toddlers and preschoolers. They are so comfortable with just going in their pants, imagine putting your butt on a big unknown bowel and trying to make something happen on demand that has always just happened on its own.