This is the story of our first potty training experience, and how we found the method that changed everything.
"I still remember that moment so clearly: I was sitting on the floor in the bathroom next to my daughter Stella who was sitting on the potty.
She was sitting there for the third time that day, but now with big sad eyes who looked up at me and said, "Mom, I do not know what to do to make you happy. What do you want me to do?"
She looked so sad that tears welled up in my eyes and I had to turn away.
I felt so bad for putting her on the potty all the time without she really wanting to.
What where we doing? I became dizzy and felt helpless and like a complete failure. All we wanted was to help our child in the best way possible...
And then I was struck with the guilty conscience.
I thought about the times we had been annoyed with her, and it just felt so wrong. Poor child, it was not her fault, we were doing it wrong, not her!
But honestly, we did not understand what we were doing wrong. Was this not the way you were supposed to do?
We had her sit on the potty twice a day with the hopes of catching something. That was the advice we had gotten and it felt like a kind and gentle way to do potty training.
We were confident and convinced that this would help our daughter become nappy free.
But the weeks went by without progress and the whole thing felt just wrong.
Quite often she did not even want to sit on the potty, and we reached a point where she completely lost interest and began to resist…
So Stella refused to sit on the potty, and we became more and more frustrated. Unfortunately we did not always manage to hide our frustration from her. We were foolishly thinking: When would she understand?
I mean - this is how you are supposed to teach potty training, this is how everybody does it! Have we missed something? Why doesn’t it work?
And suddenly we felt very insecure... What do we do now???
More thoughts spun around in our heads: Had we started too early? Was she not ready? Had we done something stupid now?
No, that was not it. There was something else that just felt wrong...
At the time we could not figure out what it was, but we would soon make an important realisation that completely changed our view of potty training.
One day, after weeks of potty training, we suddenly understood why this sporadic and casual potty training approach would never work.
What had gnawed at the back of our minds for a long time suddenly became clear:
This was not pedagogical!
To put her on the potty a few times per day, and in between putting the nappy back on, only created confusion.
We had been sending mixed messages and it had of course been very difficult for her to understand what we wanted her to do.
Without meaning to, we had taught her to sometimes pee in the potty, but most of the time she should pee in the nappy.
So which is it, potty or nappy? No wonder she was confused.
It’s fairly obvious when you start thinking about it. How is a small child supposed to learn a new behaviour, when the child has to use the old behaviour most of the time?
That is counterproductive.
The other thing we realised was that we had put Stella on the potty, without really knowing if she needed to go.
Not particularly pedagogical.
And now afterwards we know that by doing so, the child does not learn to recognize the feeling of having to pee or poop (the body signal), nor to associate it with going to the potty.
The child does not make that connection because we parents decide when it's time to go, and thus we do not give the child the possibility to understand this for themselves.
Often the potty training goes on and on, simply because it becomes so hard for the child to understand.
And when you don’t understand, you loose interest right?
So the child loses interest and doesn’t want to sit on the potty anymore. It is very common, and it happened to us as well.
(Isn’t it very strange that this type of potty training is the most commonly advised today, since it only creates confusion in the child?)
Ok, but how can you do it more pedagogical you might think now?
Well, that was the next discovery we made. Let us tell you how it happened:
We sat around the dinner table at our Italian friends Stefano and Susannas place. As always, it was very nice, Stefano offered some grappa and we talked about all kinds of things.
Naturally, we began to discuss the subject of potty training and we told them that we did not know what we would do to help Stella.
They looked at each other, smiled a bit, and began to tell their story.
When their daughter was 2 years old, they had helped her become completely nappy free in a very short time - going from completely nappy dependent to reliably dry, also at night, in less than two weeks.
We had never heard of anything like it, and at first it was hard to believe that such a thing could even be possible.
But they continued to explain the process and we became more and more interested.
The method was kind, gentle, and pedagogical, and we immediately felt we could relate to it.
Especially with regards to the experience we were just going through.
Our gut feeling told us that this was what we had been looking for.
For the first time since we started potty training we felt we had a plan we could believe in - we could see the light at the end of the tunnel.
But first and foremost , we had found an approach we thought Stella could understand.
We wrote down the key points on a piece of paper, went home, and started to prepare ourselves.
Thanks to their story, we could now organise the potty training in a way that Stella understood almost immediately.
After just two days, she had understood what it was all about. She had learnt to recognize her signals, to control her body, and to go to the potty to do what she needed.
After three days she was dry at night.
It was both amazingly fun and also very interesting to see what a difference it made to change the approach.
That feeling, when we saw her run to the potty on her own initiative, is still difficult to describe. Tears of joy trickled down our cheeks.
And since then - as you can imagine - everyone we've met wanted to know how we did it.
Many have wanted us to write down our best tips and advice, so they could potty train their own children.
That's how the idea of a book came about.
So we decided to write the book we ourselves would’ve wanted to read, to spread this knowledge further.
We call the book “Hello Potty Training”. It's a kind, gentle, pedagogical potty training approach that works, whether you've already started potty training or not.
The method has now been used by over 103 217 families with amazing reviews."
Thank you for reading, we hope our story can spread hope and inspiration to you and your family :)
Sofia & Michael