We’ve been trying to potty train Katie now for about 3 months. She’s 2 1/2 now and she has been going without diapers throughout the day except at night and sometimes not during her nap. About every other day when we show up to pick her up for daycare, we’ve found her in different pants than we dressed her in. To get her to use the toilet, we’ve been dragging her (sometimes kicking and screaming but usually not) to the toilet to get her to go. Early on we started bribing her by offering her candy if she went to the potty. That has resulted in a few exchanges such as this that we had Friday night.
Katie: "Daddy, I need to go potty"
Eric: "You just went potty, are you sure you need to go again."
Katie: "I need to go potty to get candy"
Eric: "Do you need to go potty or do you just want candy"
Katie: "I just want candy"
One thing that’s great about kids is they aren’t very good at lying and they are forthcoming. I’ve been buying her little gifts every week or so to congratulate her for going potty on the potty, and that’s helped a little, but hasn’t gotten us over the hump. In the last couple weeks, we’ve started to grow a little tired of the every other day cleanup involved with all the accidents. We started putting her in timeout when she has an accident and that has been helping. We’ve basically tried everything at this point.
Finally, the worm has started to turn. She had no accidents this weekend – even telling me she had to go potty about 4 or 5 times this weekend. She got on the toilet right away this morning without being dragged. I think it’s starting to kick in so we’ll see if this can last. I hope so, because we’re running low on Halloween candy.
Eric's space 