Potty Training: In Less Than One Day!

It’s a book title. Really. How to potty train your child in one day. The author developed this method back in the ‘70’s and did a test study on over 200 children age ranges from 20 months to 4 years of age and all of them with with two exceptions were potty trained within 1 day w/ the average time being half a day. Their definition of Potty Training? “The child has to be able to recognize that they have to go to the bathroom without any prompting from an adult, go to their port-a-potty, pull down their pants and go to the bathroom, wipe themselves, put their pants back on, and empty the port-a-poty into the toilet… all without parental supervision”. One Day!! There’s a reason this book is not on the New York Times best seller list. IT“S A BUNCH OF CROCK! It took Araella two days to be potty trained! That’s twice as long as the case studies. I don’t know where they got their data, but it had to have been rigged.

Yes, our daughter is potty trained at the ripe old age of 23 month, 3 weeks. Of course accidents are not unheard of, but after four days with only a handful of accidents and mostly unprompted potty breaks, we consider her pretty much house trained. Not that it’s really easier per se – you still have to make sure they wipe correctly; that their shirt isn’t hanging down into the toilet soaking up pee like a oil-lamp wick; then there are those tight pants they were wearing that they can’t quite pull up past their knees; dumping the port-a-potty contents into the toilet can be accomplished unassisted, but then who wants to clean up the sides of the toilet and bathroom floor every time they miss? But hey, it is cheaper… diapers only at night, and toilet paper is much cheaper than wet-wipes. Yes, we are moving up in the world. Kudos to Tara who spent hours and hours in the bathroom with Araella using one of those dolls that wet to teach Araella the whole amazing workflow of the human discharge process. At first we had trouble with one key component in the process – getting her to actually pee. Three hours of continuous fluids; water, juice, milk, even some ice coffee and she still refused to pee. Her belly was the size of a small melon. Dang, but that girl has control that would put Hoover Dam to shame! We couldn’t get her to pee for love nor money nor a bag of M & M’s; and she sat there and complained ”mommy my belly hurts!“ Stubborn kid. Wonder where she got that from?!? Dominate traits from both chromosomes eh? Finally Hoover Dam gave way – she was so surprise she jumped off the potty in mid-flow and yelled ”Mommy, I PEE!!“ ”Yeah, great kid great. Hurry up and sit down so we can get the rest of it in there” Fortunately Cambodians have never heard of carpet and the whole house is tile.

How do Cambodians potty train their kids? One wonders. So we asked Theara. Apparently mothers start making a sound early in the infant’s development that over time the infant recognizes as prompting to go to the bathroom. Since their babies don’t have diapers, the mother’s basically learn to recognize the signs that the child is about to let loss and they run to the nearest shrub (or as I have seen a great many times in the village, the mother just holds the kid out at arm length and then kicks a bit of dust over the pile on the trail and calls it good). At about 8 months of age mother’s start putting their child on a toilet whenever they suspect the kid needs to go. By the time the child is old enough to control their bodily functions they are already well aquatinted with the whole process and just begin doing it on their own. No fuss no muss. Which is why out in the village you see little 18 and 20 month old ankle biters suddenly squat down wherever they are and whip up their shirt (no drawers to drop on most of them) and do their business. They know what it’s all about.

For us white folk, we have to write 200 books on the subject, have online discussion groups, mother support meetings, psychoanalytical PhD papers, and case studies involving lots of small naked butts and still we have mothers beating their heads against the toilet rim while their child splashes around in a yellow puddle in the living room… Ain’t it great to be civilized!