Lazy Mom's Toilet Training Tip

My kids toilet trained themselves. It was easy.

Before you understand more, here's a little history of where the current ideas of toilet training toddlers came from.

Dr. Benjamin Spock (no, not Mr. Spock) in the 1940s wrote "Baby and Child Care." His ideas included taking the child to the toilet at set times all day long until the kid finally had an accident on the potty. He counseled that the parent reward the child with candy or a cheap toy and keep up the training, slowly stopping the reward. Spock proposed beginning when the toddler was a year and a half. That's how my mother trained me.

By the 1970s some people still used Dr. Spock. Another piece of advice was to wait until the child was mature enough. You knew when to start when your child started giving people his toys as gifts. That meant he was ready to part with his poop. So "they" said.

The reward idea was still a big one. Another idea was to have a child's potty chair in the bathroom from the time the child was about a year.

Other than cloth and paper diapers, there were no disposable night wetting disposables or pull-ups. Our only choices were extra thick training pants and regular pants with cartoon and superhero characters on them.

My son was born in 1977. From the time he was one I left the potty chair in the bathroom and my son watched his parents using our big one. Sometimes he sat on his little potty, lid up, lid down, in his diapers or for a second or two before the bath without a diaper.

When he was two, I began seriously potty training him. The reward system almost broke the bank. For two weeks I gave him small plastic animals, dinosaurs, service men and the occasional M&M, all of which grew more expensive with each passing day. I began to gradually cut back. The first time my son didn't get his goody, he relapsed. No reward, no behavior. I knew he knew what to do. He was just too clever by half.

As proof of my lack of brains I tried the same stupid tactic again.

On a shopping expedition we discovered thickly padded Big Boy pants in the grocery store. I bought a pair. At home I showed my son the pants, told him what they were for and told him that when he was ready to be a Big Boy, come let me know. Then I put them on top of the refrigerator.

One day he approached me and told me he wanted his Big Boy pants. I handed them to him. After that, he had one bowel movement accident. I took him out to the backyard garden spigot, told him I was through cleaning poop and from then on he had to clean his Big Boy pants himself. That was his one and only accident.

He was three years old when he potty trained himself.

I had a daughter seven years later. I refused to offer rewards again. I realized that kids instinctively want to behave like their parents and older siblings and would when they were ready. From the time she was one-year-old the potty chair was in the bathroom for her experimentation.

When she was almost 1 ½, we bought some Big Girl pants. She refused the thick padded ones. She wanted the ones with cartoon characters. I got them. They went on top of the refrigerator waiting for the day she was ready to be a Big Girl. One day she said she wanted her Big Girl pants.

She also had one accident, so we went into the back yard to the spigot. She cleaned her pants and that was her only accident. She was a year and a half.

"What did you do?" asked our Mother's Day Out teacher who was my mother's age. "Nothing," I said smiling.

There is lots of information on toilet training out there, self-help books, articles, videos on line, store bought books or you can do nothing.