last month, I wrote about the rough process of weaning my youngest off his pacifier (his “binky”). I’m happy to report that the binky is firmly a thing of the past; he even saw his baby cousin using a binky recently and didn’t freak out as I was afraid he would.
For those interested in such things, I’m happy (and still sort of in shock) to report that this same child has also decided he’s done wearing diapers! Anyone who has helped a little one transition from full-time diapers to full-time potty knows that being done with that whole process is a Big Deal. Such a big deal! I’ve now potty trained seven boys, and what I have to say now, after this last one, is the same as what I concluded (and wrote about) after going through the process with my older boys: in my experience, children will not be fully potty trained (meaning: no more diapers or pull-ups during the day), until a switch flips in their little heads that says, “Now I get it.”
My evidence for this is based on the fact that, with each of my boys, it didn’t matter what I did to encourage them to switch from diapers to potty — whether sticker charts or promises of candy or stern admonitions or frequent and regular forced trips to the potty — nothing seemed to make the potty skills “stick.” We might have had some seeming success with some of that — I had boys who were eager to go sit on the potty with some regularity because they got chocolate chips for doing so, for example. When I would take them to the potty every twenty minutes, we were usually able to avoid soiling the underwear or pull-ups. But actually being “potty proficient” — where they recognized the urge to go and knew that meant to run to the bathroom and get up on the potty — was an achievement that only happened within their own heads, one that I couldn’t make happen.
I’m not saying it’s not important to do what you can to familiarize little ones with the idea of going to the toilet, with actually sitting on the toilet, with talking about potty things, with wearing underwear, with starting to create an expectation of going on the potty or setting goals and schedules and offering incentives that help children feel happier and/or less scared of the prospect — I think all those things will allow the shift from diapers to potty to be pretty immediate once that internal readiness happens. But again, in my experience, that inaccessible switch has to flip before there will be any true and lasting success.
My little guy spent a solid two weeks coming to terms with the loss of his binky, and it was only a couple of days after that that he told me one morning that “diapers are for babies” and he’s “not a baby anymore.” So I said, “Okay! Let’s go put some underwear on!” not really expecting it to be any different from the other (many) times over the last few months that I’ve put him in underwear for an amount of time and scurried him to the bathroom every half hour. But it was different! That day he would say to me, all on his own, that he had to go to the bathroom and he’d take off running for the potty! He wore underwear all day that day, and it wasn’t that he didn’t have accidents — he did — but it was clear in a way that’s hard to articulate that the shift had happened: that he was now an underwear kid who sometimes had accidents instead of a diaper kid who sometimes used the potty. Amazing!
Those first few days after his declaration that he was no longer a baby and diapers weren’t for him were bumpy — it’s always a little scary leaving the house with a new underwear kid (will there be accessible bathrooms where we’re going? How long is the drive? What if he says he has to go potty — how long can he hold it if we’re not near a bathroom? I kept a towel and a couple pairs of clean underwear in the van for a couple of weeks). I was reluctant to use pull-ups because I worried that it would undermine his success and new mindset, but I did think he should wear them to bed, just in case (even though he’d been dry almost every morning for months), and it worked out okay — he’s been doing great, and we’ve recently started putting him to bed in underwear.
And that was it! Within the span of a month, my baby was weaned off his pacifier and stopped wearing diapers. After seventeen years, we no longer have a baby in the house. I can’t even wrap my mind around that.
My mom recalls the day that her youngest child stopped wearing diapers as a happy one (she remembers gleefully tossing out the diaper pail), and I do feel that was as well — it’s amazing to be done with the time and grossness and cost of having to change diapers several times a day! But at the same time… I never really minded changing diapers, and I do very much mind that we are no longer a baby household. As I’ve found with most everything to do with motherhood, each phase of bringing up children is “both/and”: a blessing and a burden, a joy and a sorrow, an end and a beginning — and all of it one hundred percent completely worth it.
Kate and her husband have seven sons ages 17, 15, 13, 12, 10, 8, and 3. Email her at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..
