Womze - Cross Cultural Parenting

According to my 6 year old daughter, her Baby Brother is now transitioning from baby-toddler to toddler-baby as he turns 2.  She understands her reasoning even if I don’t, but what this meant was that we had our 2 year old well-child visit and the doctor gave us the go-ahead to begin potty training.  “Sometime between 2 and 3 is a good time to start”, she said.  The hand-out I was given said to watch out for the signs of readiness which include dry naps and grunting or straining after meals.  Hmm, I handn’t realized that grunting was one of the signs to watch out.  Grunting.

We got home and had dinner, after which Baby Brother proceeded to grunt.  “Do you want potty?”, I asked.  He ignored me.  Afterwards, the smell confirmed that he had pooped.  “Next time, you tell mommy you need potty.  Okay?”, I told him in a pleasant but matter-of-fact tone.  He looked like he understood.  Perhaps, it is indeed potty training time.  I allowed myself to hope.  I recall that recently, he has been telling me after he goes, at least, most of the time.  This is definitely an improvement on when he comfortably sat in his stink.  Hope.

The following day, we have dinner, he has post-dinner snack, he has milk, then changes into PJs and fresh diapers.  Then he begins to grunt.  Yes, he’s grunting, he’s ready for potty.  I intercede.  “Let’s go to the potty”, I put on a sweet voice.  “No!”, he barks at me.  At the same time grunting increases, he’s pushing and he does not like my interference.  “Potty.  You poopoo in potty.”, I’m getting firmer.  He gets more aggressive.  “NO!!”  This time his legs are shaking due to the magnitude of the job.  Then he’s done.

“Next time, you poopoo in potty.  Okay?”  He smiles at me.  His ordeal over, he becomes his pleasant self again.  I lead him into the bathroom where we get him out of his one piece PJ.  I extract the diaper.  I show him where the contents should go next time.  I ask if there’s more, if he wants to sit.  He shakes his head and tells me no.  I clean him up and grab a new diaper.  As I pick up the clean diaper, he shrieks, “potty”.  He decides to give the potty a try afterall.  He sits and he sings.  He looks very happy.  I wait, I sing with him, I wait.  But nothing.  “Get down?”, I ask.  He says no.  I walk out of the bathroom and he yells out, “done.”  I pick up the diaper and he scrambles back on the potty again, excitedly chanting “no no no.”  Ha!  I see his game plan - he thinks so long as he sits on the potty, he can remain butt-naked, a state he likes.

Enough of taunting this mom with potty hopes.  I grab him and strap a new diaper on him.  I’m done till he begins his next grunt.

My baby is almost two…I can’t imagine how time flies.  And I can’t believe how uninterested I’ve become in the whole potty training thing.  I was once eager and full of hope for a future devoid of poopy diapers.  That hope has turned into non-chalance.  Whenever.  I don’t care.  [Is this what happens to you when you attempt to potty train a child that is not ready?  Or when you think success with one child had something to do with your training ability?]

But Baby Brother has now decided that it is time to aggravate his pottied-out mom.  When it’s time to give him a bath in the morning, he calls out “Potty.  Potty.”  With a look of determination on his face, he gets his potty seat, places it on the toilet, positions his step stool so he his able to step up and then calls for help in getting off his diaper.  I feel like telling him “No potty.  No!”  But Hope whispers and tells me, “maybe today is the day.” 

I help him sit, while watching the time.  We should be taking advantage of every minute to get ready and get out.  We don’t have time to waste sitting on the potty doing nothing.  “Book”, he requests while holding out a hand.  I call out to his big sister to get him a book.  He babbles happily as he flips through the pages.  When he’s satisfied, he calls out “Done.”  He looks very happy.  But Hope had lied.  I talk to him like he’s a big boy.  I tell him that the potty is for real business, not reading books.  He smiles at me in a mommy-just-doesn’t-get-it way.  Precious minutes have been wasted.

We finish getting ready and on our way to the door, a message is delivered to my nose…something stinks.

Back in February, I was very excited when Baby Brother started going to our neighbors home daycare.  His new teacher asked if she could potty train him along with her son who was also one year old and I said “go for it!”  His older sister had potty trained early with some success and I was hoping to have it easier with him, but he wasn’t exhibiting any of the signs his sister had exhibited at 9 months - staying dry overnight and going on a regular schedule.  I pretty much knew what time I had to plop her on the potty.  But with Baby Brother, I couldn’t make any sense of his schedule (or lack of it) and to add to that, a stinky diaper doesn’t seem to bother him.  Left to my own devices, I would not attempt potty training him at this time, but infected with his teachers enthusiasm, I was all ready to go.  And hopeful too.

Starting potty training was exciting.  For all of us.  Baby Brother learned to sit on the potty and very patiently too.  Everyday I would exchange notes with his teacher about how he did at home and how he did at school.  He seemed to be cooperating and we were just waiting for the breakthrough.

One day, the first pee was caught in the potty to great fanfare.  His teacher took a picture.  We celebrated.  Baby Brother seemed happy and accomplished.  Every so often we would catch some pee in the potty and celebrate.  But more often than not (at least, at home), he would get up from the potty to play before the long-awaiting pee came rushing out.  After many accident mop ups, I moved him to the toilet seat.  “Gotcha!”, I thought.  He can’t get down by himself.  So he stayed put on the toilet.  He also got unhappy about his lack of freedom.  And I also suspect we may have missed some opportunities to celebrate pee trickles.  But we kept at it.  For a while.  During this time, poop in the bathtub became the routine.  Perhaps it was his way of punishing me for keeping him stranded on the toilet seat.  “Ah poopoo”, he would call out excitedly seconds after I move him from the toilet seat to the bathtub!

While all this was going on, getting ready for work in the morning was taking longer than usual.  So one day, I just didn’t bother.  No potty, no toilet seat.  I’ve had enough.  I want all messes to be contained within diapers.

Now he’s almost 18 months old, his teacher who’s been searching for solutions to the boys potty-training dilemmas says now’s the time to grab the issue by the horns.  She had success with her older son and is confounded by her younger son and Baby Brother’s resistance to the program.  “We have to be on the same page” she reminds me.  I agree as images of frenzied weekday mornings compounded with floor mopping and mess cleaning flashed across my mind.  But if she’s willing to do, if she can do it, then I will do whatever it takes.

So the potty has come back out.  All I need to do is say the word “potty” and Baby Brother marches right over and plops on it.  I’m proud of him.  But so far, not one drop of anything.  That frustrates me.  So until I have the ’strategy’ conversation with his teacher to put us on the same page (in 2 weeks), I’m not going to bother doing anything.  Except leave the potty right out within sight.  And maybe Baby Brother will just voluntarily walk over, sit and do the business I’ve been looking forward to.  That’s my dream.

At 15 months, Baby Brother started potty training in earnest.  The decision to begin was mostly driven by the desire of the lady who watches him (I’ll call her Ann).  Ann was new to home childcare, was full of enthusiasm and couldn’t wait to get the little boys (hers and mine) out of diapers.  This desire sat very well with my own philosophy.  Darling Angel started potty training at 9 months and by 11 months would tell me if she needed to poop.  Even though progress slid in later months, looking back now, it was still a huge success.

“Boys are harder to train”, people told me whenever I shared my previous potty training success.  I refused to listen to stereotypes, but gradually I began to accept it.  Afterall, this boy seemed a lot more comfortable in his mess than his sister did.  He also didn’t have a routine like his sister did.  Nor did he give off any indication of oncoming business - he did is his business without pausing whatever activity he was involved in.  When Ann asked me whether I minded having my son potty trained, I said “go for it”.  And at home, I dug out Darling Angels trusty Little Potty.

It turned out that he likes to sit on the potty.  He also likes to get up and run around like he’s discovered some new found freedom, running around butt naked.  And in the short time since we started potty training, we have had our fair share of incidents (within minutes, heck, seconds of getting off the potty).

Why won’t he sit patiently on the potty until he’s completed his business?

I have been presented with two opposing ideas.  One is that he’s potty training too early, the other is that he’s potty training too late.

Too early
“It is physiologically impossible to potty train boys this early”, a colleague explained to me.  “Both boys and girls need to be old enough to understand what you’re trying to accomplish”, another chimed in.  A child should be potty trained when the child is ready, willing and interested.  Once a child is ready to be potty trained, the process is effortless and can be completed within a week.  To force potty training on a child that is not ready is to incur headaches on oneself. 

Too late
I talked to my sister in Nigeria.  My nephew is just over 9 months old, so I ask when my sister plans to begin potty training.  “He’s not really potty trained yet”, she started to say doubtfully.  “I just put him on the potty every morning and he sits there until he poops.”  She explained that he also goes on the potty at his daycare.  I’m astounded to learn that he does his business in the potty every morning, after all, he’s a hard-to-potty-train-boy.  I share how unsuccessful we’ve been with Baby Brother because he gets up and runs around.  My nephew can’t walk yet, so there is no running around.

“That’s it!”  I say.  I needed to have started early enough to control the sitting on the potty.

My very Nigerian aunt reinforced this idea when I later shared our potty training challenges with her.  “Perhaps you didn’t start early enough?”, she asked, trying to identify the root cause of those challenges.

The solution?
Since I already missed the “early enough” potty training window, I will plan to catch the “late enough” window as early as possible.  In the meantime, since the potty is already out of storage, we will continue to use it as long as Baby Brother is happy to use sit on it.  And maybe, just maybe I will be surprised and potty training will just happen.

I’m writing this post for Children’s Classics Carnival.

My daughter was 2.5 years old, and after several ups and downs with potty training I was at my wits end. I was impatient to be rid of diapers (or pull-ups as they are called) and my impatience may have led to an undesirable consequence - my daughter felt really terrible whenever she had an accident. I did celebrate successful potty visits but I may have pulled one too many long faces while mopping the floor from an accident that my daughter began to think she was better off in pull-ups. Splurging on pretty pants did not help as she pointed out the equally beautiful designs on her ‘big kid diaper’.

Pondering how to fix the situation, I took a trip to Barnes and Noble and browsed through the children’s books section, hoping to find a good potty book. And that’s how “A Potty for Me!: A Lift-the-flap Instruction Manual ” by Karen Katz came into our lives.

My daughter thorougly loved it and soon memorized the entire book. “Mommy, get my book”, she would call as she excitedly ran into the bathroom and plopped herself on the potty. I would turn the pages while she recited the words. However, whenever it got to the point where the character had an accident, my daughter would prompt me to read the part that goes “But mommy says that’s okay”. Hearing that seemed to give her comfort. I could tell that she identified with the characte and together, they learned that it was okay to have an accident. And as she learned that it was okay to have an accident, she had less of it. A lot less and at last, we got rid of the pull-ups.

Whatever mistakes I may have made while potty training, “A potty for me” remedied it and it got my daughter over that last hump to big kids pants. Other than that, the illustrations in the book were delightful and my daughter loved turning the flap. It’s hard cover and the inside pages were durable enough to withstand daily trips to the potty.

I couldn’t hold on to the book for long as it was too good to keep. I passed it on to a former colleague who was also trying to potty train her daughter, and I hope she found similar success with it.