Potty training feels like an impossible project with a looming deadline
I wonder if the stress I feel around toilet training is part of my own difficulty in navigating the waters of change as a parent
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As I watch a mother and toddler exit the parent-child toilets at a cafe, portable potty in tow, I feel ever so slightly jealous. How I wish that was my son Ammar leaving the toilet in triumph and that I no longer had to use the nappy-changing station he’ll soon be too big for.
My son is now three and though there have been many wins over the past 12 months — from finally walking to putting together a 24-piece jigsaw all by himself — there is still one area of Ammar’s early development that we are struggling to conquer: potty training.
Every time I see a toddler marching into the toilets with their parent, I feel like I have failed at this momentous stage. In less than a year, Ammar will start nursery and I’d rather he not be a member of the one in four school-starters in England and Wales who are not fully toilet trained.
I have tried everything: potty training songs and picture books, a range of underpants with Ammar’s favourite cartoon characters and a Peppa Pig sticker chart, but he still shows no interest in using the potty. We even have a range of different potties at home — but the only loads being dropped inside are Ammar’s toy building blocks.
I have watched countless YouTube videos that promise to have your toddler potty trained in four days and, at one point, I considered booking a call with a coach and paying £80 for an online course. Back in the summer I took two weeks off work to solely focus on potty training, but no number of stickers or chocolate buttons could persuade him. His potties sit gathering dust and the Peppa Pig chart is depressingly empty.
I often think back to the women in my family in Egypt, who would hold their babies over the potty as early as six months old. It’s hard — especially as a first-time mother — to manage the feelings of anxiety around each stage of parenting. I like to think I’m good at masking it, being happy for my friends whose children seem to have sailed through ditching their nappies for underpants. I know it is not unusual for three-year-olds to still be in nappies and only 44% of boys are potty trained by the age of two-and-a-half, yet I still feel like I’m doing something wrong.
In many ways, each parenting milestone has brought similar anxieties and challenges, from Ammar’s hourly waking as a newborn to his flat-out refusal to eat solids as a one-year-old. I enter each new stage of parenting full of enthusiasm and resolve, having done my research months in advance, but when real life doesn’t match what is written in my parenting books, the task at hand feels insurmountable.
I wonder if the stress I feel around potty training is part of my own difficulty in navigating the waters of change as a parent. Perhaps, similar to Ammar, I had become so comfortable with how things used to be pre-potty that this transitional period is forcing me to reckon with the reality that he is changing and getting older, and with that comes the transition into becoming more independent.
Ammar will never be a baby again and that does bring some feelings of sadness — mourning so many beautiful moments together. But there’s something to celebrate in my child becoming a little more independent, and my life and role as a mother ever so slightly less exhausting. Ammar’s not-so-straightforward toilet training journey is an important reminder that you can’t rush children; they will do things in their own time. The time will eventually come when he doesn’t need me so much any more, so I should enjoy these final months of him being a toddler.
Of course, I am repeatedly reminded by family, friends and health visitors that children develop at different rates — it’s normal. Elizabeth Pantley, author of The No-Cry Potty Training Solution, says the majority of potty trainees experience setbacks and, if nothing seems to be working, to take a break and then try again.
I guess that relates to all parts of life. Success is never linear — I have seen it within my own journey, from my recovery from postnatal depression to strength training at the gym. You progress and sometimes there are setbacks. The most important thing is consistency, to keep showing up and trying. And I will keep showing up and trying for Ammar.
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