Parenting Advice From Joy Berry: Potty Training

My son and daughter are only 10 months apart. (So much for the old wives tale that one couldn’t get pregnant while nursing!) For what seemed to be an eternity, I had two little ones in diapers at the same time. Disposable diapers were only a twinkle in some corporate inventor’s eye, and the children’s father subscribed to the notion that changing diapers was a job for mothers. (He even offered the notion that a magical hormone made mothers immune to the smell of dirty diapers!) So I was on my own and couldn’t get my two children potty trained fast enough.

All of this is to say that no one could be more sympathetic to parents who want dirty diapers to be a faint memory. My toddler son did not share my goal. Indeed, he was quite content to have me change his diaper and was especially resistant to giving up this benefit of babyhood as long as his baby sister was receiving it. The only thing that began to lure him away from full diaper service was some big-boy underwear imprinted with his favorite superheroes. Having him “shoot” at toilet paper squares in the toilet was also a big hit. But even with these tricks, it seemed like it was going to take forever to get him out of diapers.

In desperation I consulted an early childhood specialist at the graduate school I was attending. After my lament that it felt like my son was going to be in diapers forever, she chuckled and told me, “Unless he’s still in diapers when you enroll him in kindergarten, you have nothing to worry about.”

Looking back, it was the best advice I could have gotten as a neophyte mom who was struggling to survive. At the very least, it helped me relax so that I could accomplish the first step to any successful potty training program, which is to wait until the child is ready to potty train.

Sometimes the answer to a parent’s anxiety-laden question is just as simple as the advice I received from my mentor.