When you’re a parent you get a lot of unsolicited advice. From the moment I was visibly pregnant with my first I had strangers stopping me on the street to offer their two cents.
“Sleep now! You won’t be sleeping once the baby gets here!”
“Read everything you can –you need to be prepared!”
“Don’t read anything – you don’t want to know!!”
When my baby was born the advice just kept rolling in:
“Let him cry it out! It’ll toughen him up!”
“Cry it out is all wrong! Babies need comfort!”
In my six years as a Mom I’ve had relatives give me parenting advice based on Facebook photos (“You know, he’s getting too dependent on that pacifier!”) I’ve had passersby dole out advice at the park (“Better get them under control now Mama – it only gets harder!”) and I’ve gotten dubious advice from fellow parents as we sat together at the playground (“If he bites just go ahead and bite him back!”).
Some of the advice has been useful and a lot of it (like, say, the biting thing) has been quite terrible – but I have to admit that knowing which advice to take has not always been perfectly clear.
Now that I’ve let it be known that I’m starting to potty train my second child the advice is coming in fast and furious yet again.
“We used the one-day method! It’s the only way to go!”
“Don’t rush it – you’ll know when they’re ready!”
“Don’t wait for them to get ready – DO IT NOW! He’s WAY too old to be in diapers.”
Like most parenting advice, advice about potty training tends to have two distinctive characteristics:
- There is a lot of it
- It is almost always contradictory
When it came to my oldest son I’d followed the advice that tended towards the use of old-fashioned reason. My big guy was a fairly logical fellow and so I simply explained to him that big boys don’t wear diapers. I laid out for him all the advantages of being a big boy – I told him that his bottom wouldn’t be sore from diaper rash anymore. I promised we would find big boy underwear featuring his favorite characters. I contemplated with him all the great things that big boys get to do that little boys in diapers couldn’t do. All of this was deeply motivating and he was fairly easy to train.
When my second son started getting ready for the potty I thought I had the whole thing down. I gave him all the same speeches that had worked so well on his brother. And you know what? They backfired completely. My second child was petrified by the concept of being a “big boy”. He would cry whenever I suggested the idea and began insisting morning, noon and night that he was still a baby and that babies needed diapers. For whatever reason this kid wanted no part of being big and as long as that’s what potty training represented to him he wanted no part of it either.
All that wonderful advice about making the potty seem like an exciting transition to “big boy-dom” was TOTALLY wrong for my younger son. For him, I needed a whole new game plan. So, I pushed a little less. I stopped emphasizing being BIG and instead I tried to make a fun game out of using the potty timer. I put up a sticker chart and labeled it “Little Boys Use the Potty Too” and made sure to spend more time talking about how he’d always be my baby no matter how big he got.
So far, it’s been working pretty well.
My take-away is that it is great to listen to other people’s thoughts and find sources of information that you trust whenever you take on a big parenting challenge, but when it comes time to implement what you’ve learned, remember that outside guidance will only work if it works for you and your specific child.
But, I mean, that’s just my advice.
