For the last few weeks I’ve been working with Katherine on pottytraining. It’s going well. But this is one area where I bothered to do a bit of reading, and everything about the way it’s going in our house makes me realize that I get very little help from reading such books.
“Begin when the child shows interest”: Katherine initially showed great interest, but has hopped from hot to cold several times in the past several months. When I finally decided to dive in, I was appalled to see her enthusiasm quickly turn to kicking-and-screaming protest. She has since gotten much better, but in every endeavor she makes sure that a protest is registered first, lest I think that we’re in on this together. She has a nose for a parental agenda, and she’s not about to let herself be carried along without a fight!
“Be very clear about rewards”: when Katherine thinks she’s earned one, she has a fantastic memory for all of the fun rewards I promised or even hinted at since the moment she was born. She is not about to miss an opportunity to collect. But as far as using rewards to convince her to try something she has not already decided to do? Not a chance.
When we were looking through a new book the other day she suddenly got very excited: “B-O-O-K. Book!” I was thrilled that she remembered . . . but then I had to point out that the “K” needed to come immediately after the other three letters (The book was titled “Peek-a-boo!”). That’s very indicative of her learning style: she loves some letters and some words and some numbers, but shows absolutely no interest in mastering the entire alphabet or the entire number sequence. Drives me crazy, but I’ll just keep looking for ways to encourage her to learn things beyond whatever initially catches her fancy. Right now she’s busy trying to dress her stuffed animals in diapers, and I have to keep an eye on her to prevent her from changing Nathaniel’s diaper (poor guy!). He is relatively unruffled by her antics and is currently trying to move from walking to running. I’m also wondering how long it will be before he and Katherine are the same size . . .
Erin
Alan Schmierer
Good for you for tackling potty training! Lily is similar… she used to be very interested, but the more she sense my agenda, the less interested she’s become. So we’re not pushing it, but we’ll try again this spring or summer. Hope you have quick success!
Potty training is probably one of the worst parts of being a parent. Ugh! Each kids is different and is on a different time frame and needs different incentives, etc. Don’t be afraid to cut you and Katherine some slack if you need to, though. One friend really helped by think about potty training differently. She said that it’s like a pie and all the pieces need to be there for it to work out. Like one piece might be that the child tells you when they need to go and one might be that they can pull down and up their own clothing and one might be that the parent is ready to really commit to the task and the list goes on. She encouraged me not to rush it. I was really freaking out about having a child who just turned 3 that wasn’t potty trained and she encouraged me to change my mindset. To have the goal of having him potty trained by the time he was four and not insist that since he was now three that he must instantly be potty trained. It really helped. Anyway, I wish you the best. Go with your gut. Do what works for you and your kid not what some expert may or may not say. 🙂
Thanks, Kris, for the encouragement! I remembered one other unhelpful piece of parenting advice: “Girls will be easier to pottytrain than boys.” Katherine has done very few things the way that the girl track runs in early childhood (language over physical skill, etc.), so I set that advice aside as soon as I read it, which has made things easier.
Thus far she seems to be doing really well, more because she’s now interested in the game than because of any incentives I’ve offered. I was more worried before I began, since Katherine can be hard to read, and I knew that she might well fight me even if she was really keen on it. But I will probably have a hard time staying attentive for as long as this will take; the other day I ran upstairs for a minute without checking in with Katherine first, and I got to clean pretty much every piece of fabric in the house upon my return 🙂