Why I Am Not Potty Training My Child

Several months ago, I went online and ordered a potty. It arrived, and we put it in the living room. After a few months, S sat on it... and tried to push it around the living room like a ride-on toy.

I had vaguely thought that I might try potty training some time over the summer. Nursery was closed for two weeks in August, so if S wasn't trained by then, we would concentrate on it during those two weeks.

Talking to a friend, she told me she had trained her daughter completely, with no accidents, in a week using the Gina Ford potty training book. I balked at this suggestion; I have a deep-rooted mistrust of anything Ford has to say. My friend persisted though, telling me: if you can get your head past it being Gina Ford, it's a great book. I bought the book. It's a Gina Ford book. I got as far as the first case study, where she calls the child stubborn, and describes it as a nightmare. When the child had issues over eating tea, Ford advised the mother to take his tea away, and if he asked for food later not to give it to him. He was shut in his room to dress himself (at age four, when previously his mother had always dressed him), and bribed using a star chart to change his behaviour. At that point, I threw the book across the room. I'm not bribing my child or manipulating her behaviour in that way.

I've not been overly bothered by a desire to get S potty trained; I always figured she would get there in her own sweet time. I've been inundated with advice from well-meaning friends though, who seem to think S should be potty trained by now and completely out of nappies. I'm given advice almost daily: "what you need to do is..." or "what I did was..." The assumption seems to be that because she is two years old, she shouldn't be wearing nappies any longer. Don't worry about whether she's ready, whether she wants to be potty trained, whether she's capable of thinking "I need a wee, I'd better sit on the potty."  People delight in telling me how they potty trained their child, but a lot of the stories I hear do not sit well with me. Even the term "potty training" bothers me. It sounds like something you do with a dog, not a human child. 

Over the last few months, S has occasionally expressed a desire to sit on the potty. Sometimes she does a wee in it, and proudly shows me... and then she gets a nappy out and brings it to me, asking me to put it on. Sometimes I ask if she would like to take her nappy off and use the potty when she needs a wee; about half the time she says yes, and takes her nappy off. The other fifty per cent of times, she says very clearly, "no!" Many times when she says she wants to take her nappy off, she sits straight on the potty and waits until she's done a wee - even if that's ten minutes or longer. Just as many times, she gets bored and goes off to play, and ends up going on the floor. 

A well-meaning friend bought S some pants, which I offer to S from time to time. Only once has she agreed to put them on, and then ten minutes later she wanted them removed and replaced with a nappy. To me, this says that she is not quite ready to go into "big girl pants" just yet.

When S returned to nursery after the holidays, I asked them to offer her the potty when they went for nappy changes, but not to make a big deal out of it. She always seems to say yes to using the potty there, probably because all of her friends do. Yesterday I went to collect her, and found that she had sat on the potty twice, and done a wee both times. She was very pleased with herself, and rightly so. I'm still not taking away her nappies and making her exclusively use the potty though. As soon as we got home, I gave her the option of removing her nappy and she declined. I offered her the potty several times before bed, and she refused each time.

Meanwhile, I've been reading Toddlercalm (review on its way!), and it's all about giving a child as much control as possible over their own lives. This is similar to what I've previously read in Happiest Toddler on the Block, and something that resonates with me more than training my child like an animal. S is the person who knows best when she is ready to use the potty or toilet, and when she wants to stop wearing nappies. We have potties in the house; we have a step and a toilet seat.  She can use them, or not.

In this article on the Huffington Post site, Steve Hodges MD says that he believes few children are genuinely ready for toilet training before the age of 3. In this article on Babble, Hodges goes on to say that children's bladders are still growing up to the age of 3, and they are best placed to do that when filling and emptying uninhibited - without the child trying to hold it in for fear of not getting a star on a chart. 

Yes, it's entirely possible to potty train a child before they're properly ready - and I believe these days a lot of children are trained very early, out of some weird sort of one-upmanship, or parents following Gina Ford's overall plan of working to a schedule (right, you're two, time to get rid of the nappies!). But that doesn't mean it's the best thing for the child. I believe the likes of Gina Ford have encouraged us to believe our children are lazy, manipulative tantrum machines that need to be whipped into shape and "broken" into the correct way of doing things like wild animals. That is not how I see my child, and it is certainly not how I ever intend to treat her.

As with all other posts on this blog, I don't care when or how you potty trained your child. I don't care what you think I should be doing with my child and I really do not have the time or the inclination to judge anyone for their choices. For me, for S, we are doing what is right. And that is all that matters to either of us.

On The Absence of a Man

One of the main issues I have with being on my own with S is that she only has me to look after her.

For the most part, that is a definite plus in our lives: we have half the bed each (well, to be fair I think she takes up more than half a lot of the time), we don’t have to share each other’s time with anyone else, and we’ve developed a very strong bond.

My friend says I have First Baby Syndrome: I use the sling more often than the push chair; I carry S everywhere with me; I rarely leave her with anyone. In fact, I’ve probably left her less than a dozen times, each for no more than an hour. Depending on who you speak to, this is either a really good thing and means we’ll have a firm bond that will last S long into adulthood, or it’s really quite bad and S will be some weird mummy’s girl forever tied to my apron strings. 

When faced with the choice between Gina Ford and Dr Sears’ Attachment Parenting, I’ll opt for Sears every time. Being on my own means I’m probably making life very hard for myself by going down this route. S is never left to cry if I can help it, and I get quite irate if someone I leave her with lets her sit and cry. She is breastfed on demand, and I have no interest in trying to find ways of tricking her into sleeping through the night before she is ready. As a health visitor pointed out to me not so long ago, if you decide you’re going to exclusively breastfeed, on demand, for the first six months, you kind of just have to accept that your life is not your own for that time. There are several people with whom I would happily leave S for extended periods of time, but at the moment there is no point exploring that avenue, because I need to be nearby to feed her every few hours; more when it is hot out, or she is teething or feeling otherwise unwell. I am perfectly happy with this. If S turns out a weirdo because of it, well then all the Gina Ford subscribers can have their perfectly-trained toddlers pelt me with copies of her books.

The only problem comes at times when it would be useful to have a second pair of hands. For example, if I’ve not had my dinner before S goes to bed (most nights), and she’s having trouble settling to sleep (every night at the moment), it can get fairly frustrating to spend an hour or more trying to get her to sleep when my stomach is growling and I’m tired and fed up. She is teething at the moment, and has had some fairly miserable, grizzly days when I’ve had no choice but to feed her Calpol and Nurofen every couple of hours and spend large portions of time with her sitting on my lap, chewing my hand through a muslin and crying whenever I try to put her down and sneak off to the toilet. I actually ended up putting a Bumbo chair in the bathroom in the end, so that I could just take her to the toilet with me. (incidentally, I hear that’s a good thing for helping them to toilet train early, but still, I’d rather pee in peace sometimes, ya know?) 

Also there are times when I could do with just popping to the shop to get some milk, or to post a letter, but I don’t bother going because it is too much bother to get S into the sling, and she usually falls asleep in it any way, which makes for trouble at bed time, which is something I have to then deal with on my own. 

Taking S out in the pushchair is also an ordeal, being as we are, on the first floor. It would be handy to have someone to help carry the pushchair up and down the stairs. Someone to carry the shopping, someone to help with the housework, someone to play with S when I want to spend more than 5 minutes in the bath in the morning, someone to answer the door when I am breastfeeding (that’s a sure-fire way to get rid of unwanted callers, let me tell you), someone to whom I can say, “wow, did you see what she just did, that was awesome!” 

I have been sitting here racking my brains to think of other examples of when it would be useful to have a partner, and can come up with none. Obviously it would be nice for me to have some adult company and hugs and kisses and suchlike. But realistically, when S is awake my attention is on her. History attests to the fact that I have, at best, shoddy taste in men. I would not consider having any potential new beau around while S is awake. My evenings are fairly full, what with housework, decorating, two Open University modules, a blog, and an unhealthy addiction to several TV series via Netflix. If I were to acquire myself a young man, realistically they could only spend one or two evenings a week (from 8 til 10pm at most) here. And since S shares my bed, there is no space for a man in it.

Obviously, S doesn’t know any different, so it’s not like she feels that she’s missing out. When her father first cleared off, I had major concerns about her missing out on having a daddy and feeling like she only had half a family. But actually, when you look around you these days, it’s not like when I was a kid and everyone lived at home with mummy, daddy, a dog, one or two siblings and a white picket fence. In fact, by the time I was a teenager probably a lot of my peers’ parents had divorced. The modern family is no longer a heterosexual, married couple with 2.4 children; in fact, one of those is quite rare these days. Many families are made up of children from past relationships, step-siblings, half-siblings, extended family either living together or spending a lot of time together, and neighbours or friends who are no relation at all spending more time with the child than one or both parents. The options I was faced with when S and I came home from hospital meant that either I maintained a strong bond and a good routine with her, or she spent time with her father. There was no middle ground to be had. Since then other details have come to light which mean that, even if he were to attempt to locate that middle ground, I would be having none of it.

From a financial point of view, I am probably better off being on my own with S. I know a lot of women who have had to go back to work after having a baby a lot sooner than they would have liked; many perhaps would have liked to stop work altogether and focus on their child, but they cannot afford to do so. For me, being a single mother, I will be skint whether I go to work and pay for childcare, or stay home and live off benefits for a couple of years until S is in pre-school. In that way, I probably have more of a choice than most women. 

I have no qualms about living off the state for a few years, until S is in school. I have paid my taxes all my life specifically for this reason, and while I am actively raising my child I feel I am still contributing to society by not producing a delinquent for the system to deal with. I am also studying for a degree, and looking at the possibility of taking on freelance work if I decide not to go back to my job. I may still opt to go back to my job, and if that happens I will be spending a lot of time making sure wherever she goes while I am at work is offering her a better environment than staying at home with me. It has to be worth her while for me to consider leaving her.

It looks like it’s taken me less than 1500 words to convince myself that S and I are fine on our own, and do not need a man about the house, her father or otherwise.