We decided to bite the bullet and introduce potty training this weekend. We bought a potty a while ago, but we hadn’t made any attempt to have them use it. We used Azrin’s Toilet Training in Less Than a Day on a friend’s recommendation. It was written in the 70s and comes across that way, but it uses standard behavioral techniques, i.e. positive and negative reinforcement, in a fairly straightforward way.
Yesterday, I tried to potty train Miranda, but gave up by noontime. There were two major problems: one, Miranda hates fluids, and the technique relies on filling their bladder up so that you’ll have many opportunities to teach using the potty. I offered milk, water and four kinds of juice, and I could only get her to drink a total of six ounces in four hours. Miranda has never liked liquids, which accounts for her chronic constipation and dry skin/eczema. Therefore, she only peed once the entire morning and it was on the floor, of course. The other problem was that she didn’t want to sit on the potty for more than ten seconds, and would start to cry if I insisted that she sit for longer. I guess if her bladder was empty, she really didn’t see the point of it.
I think that she understands the concept. She was able to undress the potty training doll, put it on the potty, and clean up the “pee” afterwards. She’ll just need to be trained over a period of several days where she can be put on the potty every 90 minutes or so, but as of now, she’s back in diapers.
This morning, I tried to train Eleanor. Eleanor is the opposite of Miranda, in that she doesn’t like very many solid foods, but she loves liquids. If she could eat a completely liquid diet, she would. Therefore, in the same four hours that Miranda drank six ounces of fluid, Eleanor drank 35 ounces! And instead of peeing one time, she peed ten times! Five times were on the floor though. However, by the end, she seemed to understand what the urge to pee felt like. And she was initiating going to the bathroom by herself. The problem though, was that sometimes she didn’t make to the bathroom fast enough. I guess that’s why the book recommends keeping a potty in every room in the house, including the backyard if you’re having a barbecue!
Anyway, Eleanor was beaming by noontime. She was so proud of herself and her new underwear. And the good thing about this technique is that you don’t have to keep bringing them to the potty, you just ask them if they need to use the potty every hour or so, and they can decide themselves if they need to go.
I’ll update further when she goes back to school in two days. I hope that she’s willing to use the toilets at school. They’re basically miniature versions of adult toilets, but they’re still a lot bigger than the potty, i.e. her feet dangle and she could fall right in if she leaned back too far.