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Every Child Is Different
Individual Tales from the Potty Training Trenches
By Kelly Burgess
"My biggest 'wish I had known' story starts with the very label of 'potty training,'" she says. "We had the hardest time training our oldest daughter and had enormous pressure put on us by the daycare center that had all sorts of rules about which rooms kids could go in based on age and who was trained. We quickly figured out 'training' was a joke. You couldn't train a child to learn their body's cues. All a parent can do is help a child recognize those cues and learn how to manage them. 'Potty guiding' became our MO when our second daughter was born, and her 'guiding' went beyond smooth with no angst. We picked a daycare for her that had no rules or pressure built into any room choice."
Dr. Gwen (as she prefers to be called), says the biggest sign that they were on the wrong path was that their daughter was fully trained when she wasn't with her parents. The O'Keefe's finally surmised that this was because those other grownups weren't invested in "training" but tuned into monitoring for her cues. She uses an example of her mother-in-law, who didn't look at her watch to take her grandchild potty, but merely watched for those telltale signs, such as squirming.
When the Dr. Gwen counsels families, she tells them this: Don't over orchestrate. Don't over manage. In fact, don't attempt to drive the process at all. Pressure doesn't work, but helping a child learn to listen to her own body does. Had she known this with Daughter Number One, she says, she would have saved herself a great deal of stress and concern.
