Potty Training Guide

POTTY TRAINING YOUR CHILD IS ONLY AS DIFFICULT OR AS EASY AS YOU MAKE IT FOR YOURSELF AND YOUR CHILD

A surefire way to make training your toddler a difficult experience for the entire family is to be ill-prepared for the task at hand. If you look at training as being a battle that needs to be won or something more complicated than it actually is, then your own internal dialogues will sabotage your efforts before you and your baby have had a chance to even get started.

The best way to ensure that your approach to getting your child out of diapers is the right one, is to read a potty training guide that will prepare you for the true learning experience that potty training really is.

FAILURE IS CERTAINLY AN OPTION IF YOU HAVEN'T MADE A POTTY TRAINING PLAN THAT WORKS FOR YOU, YOUR FAMILY, AND MOST IMPORTANTLY YOUR CHILD

Think back to when you were first contemplating having a child. Was it a whim? Was it something you chose to do for the rest of your life because you and your significant other had nothing else better to do on a Saturday night? Of course it wasn't! You carefully thought about how having a baby would change your routines, your schedules, your entire life.

Remember how you planned and prepared yourself for your new arrival? Remember how you read everything you could because babies don't come with instruction manuals and you wanted to be the best parent you could be? It's important to remember that when your bundle of joy finally arrived, you did a good job of parenting because you took a bit of what you learned from books and your own intuition and combined them into a parenting strategy that you were comfortable with and worked for your family.

Making a plan of action that works for your family and your life situation is the single most important factor when it comes to successful potty training. Without a plan, there is no accountability, no consistency, no frame of reference for you and your spouse to look at and see what's working for your child and what isn't.

THE TRAP THAT MOST POTTY TRAINING PARENTS FALL VICTIM TO IS THE ONE WHERE THEY PRESUME THAT THEIR CHILD WILL JUST NATURALLY MAKE THE TRANSITION FROM DIAPERS TO THE TOILET ALL ON THEIR OWN

Your child has no reason to start using the toilet or potty unless you give them one. Children aren't born with an innate sense of how bodily functions work, or a built-in timer that alerts them to the fact that you would like them to start using the toilet at around the age of two.

A baby would be more than happy to live out their entire childhood in a diaper because it's what they've always done and it works for them. They don't care that it's not what you the parents want, they only know that their needs are met when you change their diapers and that is all they will want to know unless you guide them along in the potty training process.

It's not good enough to go out and buy your little one a potty when they're almost three years old and plunk it down and tell them to use it since your previous plan of having them do it on their own didn't quite work out. But if you read up on potential potty training strategies and started implementing those strategies by the time your baby was eighteen months old, then your little one would have been potty trained long before they even turned two.

ABANDONING YOUR POTTY TRAINING PLAN BECAUSE IT'S NOT WORKING IS THE REASON IT'S NOT WORKING

It always amazes me to hear parents talk about how they've tried everything to get their child potty trained and it's just not working. Without realizing it, they've actually sabotaged their own success by not sticking with a consistent method of training their child.

Just look at the laundry list of things a frustrated potty training parent will tell you about their experience. They will tell you that they tried putting the potty in every room of the house, letting the child naturally play with or sit on the potty, praising their child when they were successful, scolding them when they weren't, rewards and bribes, refusing to let their child wear diapers until they eventually soiled the couch and so it was back to diapers...and the list goes on and on.

If you were to follow a potty training guide that you prepared for yourself in advance, you would be working within and sticking to, a set of parameters that you yourself decided long ago would be something that your particular situation, your family, and your child could live with without tears and frustration.

There is no one potty training technique that is guaranteed to work for all children. It is more of a combination of a few of the best training techniques that will be the key to your family's success. Taking the time to read an informative and well written potty training guide that covers all the best training methods will allow you to make your action plan and stick with it as a family as you teach it to your child. If you're consistent in your approach once you've made your plan, your child will learn how to potty train and you will be successful together.