Disclosure: This potty time post is sponsored by Pull-Ups® Training Pants. All thoughts and opinions are the author’s.
In a parent’s life, you see true joy and excitement in your child’s eye at a few special moments: when he is presented with his first birthday cake, taking his first steps or, in my son’s case, when he saw a box full of Pull-Ups® Training Pants with Mickey Mouse on them.
That’s right, my son was ecstatic about opening the big box that arrived with enough training pants to get him ready to join the Pull-Ups® Potty Partnership.
This box and its contents are the beginning of a major transition in my son’s life, a transition even he understands is a big moment in his life – potty training. This box and the Pull-Ups inside are going to help give him the independence he needs on his potty journey and – believe it or not — going into this, I knew that it was going to be a fun journey.
I felt my son was ready for this move to Pull-Ups because he would start mimicking myself or his sister when he would follow us into the bathroom. At potty time, he would try to slide his diapers off and sit on the stool in the bathroom. Although he never did anything in the potty, this was a sign that he was ready.
The Pull-Ups Potty Partnership has a cool website dedicated to helping parents at this stage in their child’s life. To start, I went there to learn my child’s Potty Training Personality.
Find their personality? Yep. Knowing your child’s personality helps you select the potty time teaching methods your child responds best to so potty training will be easier.
According to the quiz, my son’s potty personality is a Puppy: Lots of energy, pretty easy to direct, loving, enthusiastic, and irritable when tired, hungry or sick. That described my kid down to a tee. Knowing this would help my wife and I use ways that best motivated his learning and made potty time fun time.
So how do we make pooping fun?
When we potty trained his older sister, we used charts, songs and games to get her to use the potty. The chart had her favorite cartoon characters on it. We would use one sticker for when she did No. 1 and two stickers for No. 2. We sing a song with her where we would just repeat, “Come out poo-poo, come out!” before you knew it our little girl was potty trained.
Since it was kind of easy with our daughter, we thought potty time would be easy with our son, too. Boy, were we wrong. We quickly learned potty training shouldn’t be done through a one-size-fits-all method. Kids are unique and special in their own ways and the key to success in potty training is working WITH your child’s personality, not against it.
Our son was not as ready to start using the potty as we initially thought. Even though he loved putting on his Pull-Ups, he would not let us know when he needed to go to the bathroom so we’d find many surprises for us in his Pull-Ups every now and then.
We introduced our son to a potty training progress chart and showed him how he could put a sticker on it whenever he did any of the items listed there. It started pretty well but the important thing I also learned about using stickers is that they are most effective when used as an immediate positive reinforcement rather than as a goal to save up for later. Toddlers don’t have a solid sense of time, so we always gave him the sticker right away and let him show off his progress to family members and friends.
We also used a song to make potty time more fun for our son.
Our son loves to sing and dance, so why not sing the same song that we used to sing with our daughter? We did but it seemed like we sat there forever with him waiting for him to have some sort of movement. We never tried to rush him, for fear that he would not want to sit on the potty, so we just let him take his time.
As of this moment, we are still potty training but making progress. Some days he lets us know he has to go due to the cooling sensation he gets from the Pull-Ups® Cool & Learn® Training Pants. While by then it was too late, it really did teach me to start to recognize the signs of needing to go because we had a breakthrough recently when he ran to the bathroom all by himself and called out to my wife. When she walked in, he was sitting on the potty where he peed all by himself.
Maybe this is the moment that we were waiting for … we’ll see what happens next.
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