Training or Learning

It often seems as soon as your child passes their first birthday, learns to walk and speak the polite remarks begin. By the time my daughter was two I used to sit in our kinder music class with paranoid delusions that every other mother was noticing my daughter was still wearing a nappy while it seemed everyone else was in undies and doing the very common,"do you need to use the toilet" line every 15min. To be honest I fell into the habit of asking my daughter in the hopes that people would assuming we were trying... and failing rather than the honest truth. She wasn't ready and neither was I.

By just after 26mths I had toilet 'trained' my daughter, although it seemed more like I was the trained one as I needed to put her on the potty every 1-2 hours. She was an angel and would proudly produce what was expected when asked but had no interest in actually becoming independent. This was the moment I realised that this was not what the whole experience should be about. I had spent this parenting journey trying to build up an independent little person and yet at the first opportunity for her to learn about her body and the signals it was sending her I was literally flushing it all down the toilet.

So we stopped and reassessed and it was fantasitc. No more tantrums over potty's and mum was much more relaxed too. I have come to realise that it far more important that my daughter participates in this process rather then being forced into it in the long run. She now regularly talks about wees and poos and often tells us when she has done one. Occassionaly she will take herself off to the toilet and will make it on time, often we won't but it is a much better learning experience for the whole family.