Is My Child Ready for Potty Training

Is My Child Ready for Potty Training?

Parents often agonize over when to start potty training and they ask themselves, “Is my child ready for potty training?” Potty training is a learning process, not a disciplinary process, and a complicated one at that! You must teach your child what you want so that he or she can learn how to do it. Identifying the bodily sensations that indicate the need to use the bathroom and getting to the bathroom and getting clothes off in time can be a race to a (sometimes) frustrating finish for your child. Then, once a child has identified the need to use the bathroom, potty training gets really intense when a child learns that he or she must first constrict sphincter muscles to achieve control, and then relax them to eliminate. When you see all of the learning stages involved in just going to the bathroom, you realize that there really is a lot for a child to learn. Gaining bowel and bladder control is a skill and, luckily for parents, children usually like to learn new skills.

Mastering any given skill or set of skills usually follows a set pattern. This is no different with potty training. The first skill children usually master is bowel regularity, followed most frequently by bowel control. Daytime bladder control often comes next but for many children this can happen simultaneously, and finally later (often much later), comes nighttime bladder control.

Not every child will follow this pattern, of course. While girls often achieve control before boys, the opposite has also held true in some cases. Also, it is not uncommon, especially for boys over the age of 3, to achieve bladder control but not bowel control. And, of course, there are children who achieve daytime and nighttime control simultaneously. If you relax your approach to potty training, providing less stress on perfect performance, your children will be less likely to obsess over toilet training in a negative way. Instead, they will look forward to learning something new and to meeting the challenge of becoming a big boy or girl. More often than not, this relaxed approach leads to greater effort on the part of the child and their bowel and bladder functions come under their control at the same time.

4/30/2007 12:08:44 PM