Potty training failure.

This past weekend was it (actually, I started this post last week, it's now two weekends ago that I tried this). I had read the Azrin and Foxx book, “Toilet Training in Less than a Day” three times, spent the evening before making up reminder worksheets and lists for myself to refer to during the training, purchased snacks I thought Ant would like, dug around in the attic for my old baby doll that would ‘pee’.

The method was developed in the early 70’s by two psychologists who were interested in teaching retarded children and adults to use the bathroom on their own. After they came up with a procedure for that population, they realized that with minor modifications, the same ideas could be used to train children of normal intelligence. Hence the book. The method is based on a few principles – that children desire their parent’s and other’s approval, ongoing approval and treats for following instructions, repetition of the procedure, teaching someone else (i.e the doll) to use the procedure, manual guidance when instructions aren’t followed, mild disapproval when the procedure isn’t followed (i.e. pants are wet instead of the potty being used), and reducing the amount of instruction that is used as the different steps are learned.

Essentially, you first help your child teach the doll how to use the potty, and at the same time demonstrate the approval he will receive. Then you wet the doll’s pants, and have the child help you tell the doll that while we love her, we don’t love wet pants – then the doll has to practice going to the potty. After the child seems to understand the process and is able to help the doll, you then have him walk through the pottying process, providing manual guidance when he’s not doing it on his own, lots of praise as he accomplishes each steps, and treats (including lots to drink) for being a ‘big boy with dry pants’ – you do the dry pants checks, well, have the child do them, about every five minutes. As he starts to do each part of the process himself you provide less and less instruction, and less praise, until he’s doing the entire pottying of his own accord and you’re only praising the dry pants.

One of the keys to this method is that the child has to be motivated by praise from you, and the idea of praise from other family and friends. Not so much with Ant. He really doesn’t seem to care terribly much about that at all, which made things a bit difficult.

Another part of the process is “verbal rehearsal”, where you walk your child through the process by asking him questions. Well, the answer I most frequently got to questions like “Antony, will you use the potty like a big boy” was a fairly emphatic “NO”. Not quite the way the scenario plays out in the book. What they say to do if you do not get the answer you want is to ask the question again, provide the answer you’re looking for, then ask him again. I wasn’t remembering that at the time, so I flailed a little bit.

Another mistake I made was in pushing Ant to use the little potty chair we had, rather than letting him do what he actually tried to, and use the stool and potty seat we also acquired. Mark and I had decided that the stool was a bit unsafe, especially if Ant was going to be pulling down his own pants, so we preferred he use the chair. So when he walked over to the toilet, put the potty seat on, pulled over the stool and sat down, I said no, no, we’ll use this one instead. I think that was a bad call on my part, I should have just gone with what he wanted to do.

Finally, one of the things you’re supposed to try and do is to have the child do a number of potty trials and sit on the potty for as long as possible (up to ten minutes) in the hopes that the first time they do pee it’s on the potty, so you can praise them. Well, Ant was much more interested in playing with the syringe we were using to feed the doll water, using it to stir his drink with, than he was in following my instructions and using the potty. With the result that when he did pee (I had been wondering if he had the necessary bladder control – it took over an hour of him in big boy pants before he finally peed, so at least I answered that question), it was not in the potty but in his pants. At that point I tried to get him to do the practice trials that are supposed to teach your child to get to the potty and lower their pants quickly, but again he was totally not interested, so I decided that we had to call it a day and try again another time.

All in all it ended up being a good thing, as he got a violent stomach bug later in the day and spent the next week throwing up. I don’t think that trying to reinforce the potty training under those circumstances would have worked terribly well either.

Overall, I still think that it’s a promising approach, and may just try it again in a while, when I feel like Ant will be less distracted, and perhaps better motivated by making us happy. We’ll see…