Potty training your toddler can be a both rewarding and a very challenging experience. So I wanna share with you today my number one tip for making potty training so much easier.

Let me give you a little example. I was on a summer holiday with great friends of ours and they have a three year old son who they were in the process of potty training.

Now, it seemed like a great idea at the time to do it on a holiday but in retrospect, they thought maybe we’re just a little bit too busy for this but my advice is once you’ve decided to make the commitment to potty training, you’ve got to keep going regardless. If you show your child that there’s a way out of this or we don’t have to do this then it’s going to be all the harder.

So I gave her my favorite piece of advice when it comes to potty training and that is to use a timer.

Now, it sounds so simple, I know, but it makes a really big difference and there’s a few reasons why.

One, toddlers are becoming their own little person. They’re becoming aware of the fact that they have some control over things and they have their own will and desires and wants and they express that often and so what can happen when you start the potty training experience is that it can become a bit of a battle of wills and that’s what I noticed was happening with my friend and her son, that there was just a little bit of stubbornness and strong-headedness on the toddler’s part which is very common of all toddlers and so it was just becoming this sort of not very fun, very frustrating experience.

So by using a timer, you take the pressure off of you. It’s not necessarily you that’s saying you have to go to the bathroom now, it’s the timer. So it builds a little bit of distance between you and the child and then you just set the timer basically for every 45 minutes when you start and every time the bell rings, it’s time now to stop what we’re doing and go to the bathroom.

You don’t have to go. If you don’t have to go, that’s fine but every time the timer goes, we’re gonna go and try and see.

Now, the first few times, there’s still resistance, right, especially if they’re engaged in something fun and they don’t wanna stop and go to the bathroom. They’ll often say, no, I don’t want to but you have to make it a nonnegotiable and that’s very important. That bell has gone, we have to go. Whether you like it or not, this is happening, okay, and then the good news is that as this process goes on then the child understands that well, there’s really no way, there’s no reason to fight this because we’re going anyway, right?

It kind of goes back to that easy way or the hard way discussion we had a few weeks ago and they realize that, you know what? It’s faster, it’s easier if I just cooperate, I drop what I do, I go try to use the bathroom and then I come back and it’s a great way to kinda minimize the protest around this and in the course of the week, we saw a big change in my friend’s son too with his, and there were times where he would hear the bell ring and he’d just get up and start walking towards the bathroom without any real muss, fuss or bother about it.

So that is a great way to keep this moving in the right direction, get your toddler on board with this.

Now, it still takes some work. Don’t forget, nothing in parenting is ever easy so this is definitely gonna take some commitment but it’s a great way to take the pressure off you and make this experience go a little smoother.

Thanks for watching today. Sleep well.