Mother of Twins

Potty training twins is much harder than potty training a singleton. I'm not sure why that is, but I had much harder time training my twins! I think a lot of it has to do with the dynamics of the twin relationship. Together they are orders of magnitude more stubborn than one child alone. Until you can get to the point where they both want to use the potty, it is useless to even try to train them. Occasionally one twin will be ready to use the potty weeks or even months before the other. This is more likely to be the case with fraternal twins. If this happens, you can try to train just the one twin.

Before you start trying to get them to use the potty, you need to get them used to the idea. Show them potty videos, read them potty books and start taking about how big kids wear underwear and use the potty. Eventually, they will decide they want to be big kids too.

Once you get to that point, you've won about half the battle. The last thing you want to do is try to potty train a child that is screaming at the top of his or her lungs every time you try to sit them on the potty. If that happens, give up for the time being and try again later when they are more receptive to the idea.

I highly recommend getting two potty seats. Take your twins with you to the store and let them each pick out their own seat. You will also want to let them pick out their own underwear. Pull-ups are not recommended, except for at night, naps and traveling. The last thing I want to deal with is accidents when I'm on errands, so I always put them in pull-ups for the first month or so whenever we went somewhere.

Now that you've got the potty seats and the underwear, let's talk about incentives. Most kids respond well to some sort of incentive for using the potty. We used M&Ms and stickers. Each time they were successful on the potty, they got some M&Ms and a sticker to add to their potty chart. You'd be surprised how well this works. As they got better at using the potty, we phased out the M&Ms and stickers.

The big day has come and your all ready to start training. Tell them today they are going to start using the potty and put them in their underwear. Have them sit on the potty ever half hour or so to try to go. Let them drink lots of water so they will need to go frequently. They should start getting the idea by the end of the day. If not, they may not be ready and wait a few more weeks and try again. Give lots off praise, stickers and M&Ms. Soon they won't need diapers anymore!

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