When
I was training my older son, his "potty obstacle" was clear. His main
problem was the fact that he really didn't want to stop whatever he was doing
and head to the bathroom when he needed to go.
To
combat this I worked on a strictly timed protocol. Every twenty minutes,
whether he liked it or not, we headed to the restroom and he at least made an
effort. This system worked extremely well and cut way down on accidents.
When
I started training my second son I anticipated having the same problem. I began
working my timer system all over again and I fully anticipated smooth sailing
to potty training success!
Yeah,
not so much.
My
second son didn't seem to mind breaks in his play but his resistance to the
potty remained nonetheless absolute. I couldn't put my finger on exactly what
was going wrong but I could tell that things were definitely--OFF.
Finally
late one evening after a fraught day of training, I noticed my son was in tears
as I lead him towards the bathroom. I stopped and asked him what was bothering
him so.
He
stopped and looked up at me wide-eyed and said, "Mom, I just really
don't want to be a Big Boy."
AH-HA!
Turns out my second son's problem wasn't getting to the potty, it was what the potty represented to him. He was worried that if he learned to use the potty, that meant that he wouldn't be little anymore. Once I realized this we went got off of "schedule" mode and moved into "talking" mode. I assured my sweet guy that he could still be a little--even if he wore big boy underpants. It seemed to help.
As I
think about starting to train my third child I'll tell you what I'm telling
myself--something will probably make it difficult. It likely won't be
the same thing that made training her brothers hard and I won't even know what
the obstacle is to be before we get into it. So I'm going to just do what I
should have done from the beginning with my second son--just get started, take
it like a first-time and figure it out as I go...
