One of the best things I read in Dr. Ruf's book is that some gifted children potty train "late". Before reading that, I thought DS propably wasnt gifted because at 3 (now 3 yrs, 3 months) showed no interest in and refused to potty train. I feel like it is becoming a battle of the wills, and I am very frustrated.

Anyway, did anyone else have this issue with a DC? If so, how did you handle it? I would really like DS potty trained by the end of summer. TIA.

My oldest was cruising on furniture at 6 months, walking independently at 9 months and decided she would not wear another diaper when she was 1 1/2.

On the other hand, my youngest talked late, walked late and at 3 years old showed no signs of wanting to potty train. It was very much a battle of wills. Things that were supposed to work but did not:

Bribing with M&M's - he preferred peeing in his pants to getting any treat of any sort
Letting him run around the house buck naked - the pediatrician said sometimes the feeling of underwear next to a child's skin would stimulate still wanting to pee up against something like in the diaper. This was how I knew it was a battle of wills - he would hold it for hours upon hours and then sneak outside to pee in the back yard rather than in the toilet.
Educating - if there was a book on potty training, we read it over and over.
Comparing - he really didn't care who could or could not go in the toilet.

What finally worked was finding currency that mattered to him. He loved playing Rebel Assault whenever his older brother would leave it running on the computer. So I finally told him that only boys who went in the toilet could play big boy games. He did not wet the bed or have an accident once after that. His pediatrician said he's the only kid he knew who was potty trained through playing video games.

So, if you've had a checkup and know that there is no physiological reason your kiddo is having difficulty with toilet training, it may just take finding the right currency that matters to him.

I am having this issue too. I have a DS 3 years 1 month who can read but is not potty trained. Ahh, Asynchrony!! No advice, just in the same boat.

You have described my DS perfectly except that when he wants an M&M (which is maybe once a week), he will go to the potty. Now, I just need to figure out what would be a good motivation. Thank you!

My DD's currency was preschool. We told her preschool wouldn't take her in diapers. She said she was ready to use the toilet a few days before school started. At that point, it was clear that she was physically capable of using the toilet, but disinterested. For instance, she'd go around in underwear all day with no accidents, asking for a diaper when she needed to go.

The preschool room she was in for the summer would, in fact, have taken her in diapers, so they were fine with dealing with the couple of accidents in the first week. She had a sleepover at school later in the summer, and the teacher, never having known her to be diapered, didn't put a diaper on her for overnight. She woke up night-trained.

That is great, AlexsMom. The preschool where I am hoping to send DS this fall takes kids at 2.5 years, but they must be potty trained. I am hoping to have him trained by August. Even when he (infrequently) goes to the potty, he takes off his shoes, underwear/pull up, and pants. I also need to teach him how to pull down and pull up without completely undressing his lower half. :-)

Jai, my ds was relatively late to pt, and jmo, but it's most likely going to happen when your child is ready for it to happen - if you try to force it on them earlier it can very easily turn into a battle of wills.

We were in the same type of situation with our ds where we had a preschool we wanted him to be able to go into at 3 and a requirement was that the kids had to be potty-trained. I was so panicked but, fwiw, I found out after we had ds actually in the school - a lot of the "potty-trained" 3 year olds weren't really potty trained. The preschool schedule was set up to include a *lot* of lining up for bathroom breaks for every kid during the course of the day as well as there were always quite a few bags of dirty clothes hanging from kids' cubbies at pickup at the end of the day - you got the bag of dirty clothes when your child peed/etc in their pants. I was taking those bags home for what seemed like eternity... and so were a lot of other parents. Soooo - if you get halfway there, you may very well be at (or ahead) of some of the other kiddos.

Best wishes,

polarbear

DS will be 4 in a few weeks, and he is only sort-of potty trained. We don't have very many pee accidents any more, but poop is another story. He holds it and only goes every 4-5 days, and when he goes, it's immense. We give him a good dose of Miralax every day and often a dose of Ex-Lax as well when it's been four or five days. He can read, but pooping in the potty is beyond us.

Our DS said he would start using the potty when he turned 4 -- but once his 4th birthday came, he kept delaying it -- he said he just wasn't ready...finally at about 4 and 2 months I told him he could get Jelly Car 3 (i am not a fan of jelly car) if he started using the potty -- he immediately dropped everything and ran to the toilet (but didn't have to pee) -- so he drank a bunch of apple juice until he had to go. That was it. Video game - like ABQMom. Then...he he was stuck on pull-ups (which he didn't need). We finally got rid of pull-ups at 4.5. Phew! But this is a kid who has a shoe issue too -- he is only on his 3rd pair of shoes ever (refusing to wear new shoes).

Ugh.

DS can manage all day at the Science Center without even being reminded. But once I loose the option of taking him home from there, I'm SOL. As it were. Especially S, but both, really.

People say to me that he just doesn't want to stop what he's doing, or that when he's distracted he doesn't think of it but... erm... yeah, he does best at the SCIENCE CENTER folks.

He's been "trained" since 11 mos. He just got over caring, and now he doesn't see why he should bother. Especially if he can get a rise out of us by strategic accidenting.

Ok, but, I do have a possibly-helpful comment. I ran across the tactic of asking him to "hold it" for me because he clearly needed to go desperately as we were going into an Imax show on fish (speaking of marine biology streaks). I asked if he could hold it for 45 minutes, and he said he could. And he did... and then flew out of the theater to the bathroom the second the lights came up.

After a few more shockingly good results, I've stopped asking if he needs to go, and have started asking him to "hold it untill ______" instead, doing my best impression of someone who thinks this holding it task is going to be well nigh impossible.

The biggest change is that he seems to want to generate as much pee as possible when he demonstrates that he has successfully held it -- I think to convince me of how hard he was working to accomplish this great holding-it coup. The side effect is that he needs to go less often, & I think he sees that as a genuine benefit.

I'm a little shy of him holding it too long on a regular basis, but for now it's working surprisingly well (he actually holds it less long, because of the show he has to put on about having a lot of pee in him), and I think it only has to hold so long before he'll just be used to it and not really worry about it any more.

Only about half of the kids in his 3.5-4.5 yr class are out of diapers for the class.

-Mich

That's Bear, but he's 5 now. We're still trying to figure out if it's physiological issue or pure mule-ishness.

Wolf was trained for about six months but refused to get out of pull-ups until I told him 4 year olds don't wear pull ups anymore. He turned 4 and stopped wearing them with only one or two accidents.



This is brilliant. I bet you can't! LOL I'll have to try this on Bear.

I don't know what we did wrong but nothing seemed to work for DS. Got to the point at around 3 he knew very well how peeing in the potty worked and was quite capable of it, but just wouldn't. There wasn't anything motivating enough. Didn't want to be a big boy, didn't want bribes, subterfuge, reverse psychology, etc. A lot of ideas worked once and then the novelty was gone and that was that. So, started dressing him in underwear and making him clean it up when he had an accident, which was pretty much always, that still didn't work despite his hatred of cleaning. He did start to really notice when he went though, so that was a step.

Finally, after what felt like (and was) years of feeling patient about it, I lost it one day and yelled at him for 15 straight minutes on the way home from preschool one time, me crying, him crying of course, telling him none of the other 4 year olds still peed in their pants etc etc etc. Not my best parenting moment, I still feel awful about it. But to be honest, he seemed to at that moment realize we were actually serious about the whole toilet thing. Was 100% for peeing right away. And then for pooping a few months later, pooping seemed harder for him to predict developmentally.

Polly

Thank you all so much for our stories and advice. I love this site. I finally feel like I have a place where other parents know what I am going through. Thank you.

[quote=Jai]I feel like it is becoming a battle of the wills, and I am very frustrated.
quote]

Neither of my older boys were trained before 3. And to be honest, that was fine with me because I did not want to deal with months of accidents. When they finally were trained, it was pretty much 100%, only a handful of accidents each. Some of my friends who pushed the issue much earlier spent months dealing with accidents and, ultimately, I'd guess their kids were not fully potty trained that much before mine. (Alot were of course and supposedly boys train later than girls, which seems to be true in my social group).

My 2nd DS is the most stubborn and this is what I did with him, don't know if it will help in your situation or not. I set up a reward system with something he cared about getting, and then pretended like I didn't care if he did it or not. Do it, get the reward. Don't do it, don't get the reward. Either way doesn't matter to me!

I think it took away the battle of wills and made him feel like it was his choice. And it did seem to work. But it can be hard to pretend that you don't care! lol

With DS, the thing that finally worked was that I let go of it. I absolutely could not stand myself anymore, could not stand the whole issue and the fact that we had it, could not deal with the constant poopy pants and the battle of wills and the person I had become, who was, by the way, a screaming shrew.

If I had had me for a mother at that point, I would have undoubtedly crapped my pants, too.

When I made the conscious decision to let go, that it was not going to bother me anymore and I was not going to react to it, it went away.

With DD, it was the threat of not being able to go to preschool in diapers, along with the fact that we simply stopped buying pullups and bought underwear instead. In less than a week, she was fine.

With my oldest we were potty trained at 2 1/2 could have been at 2 but the baby sitter kept letting her go back to diapers.

My 2nd dd I tried candy, stickers, making her wear underwear anyway, spanking her for accidents (I was really frustrated, some days no accidents then everyday after everytime in her panties) nothing worked. At 3 we moved and she wanted to go to school, I told her she had to be potty trained, no more accidents, she decided to just go potty. So she got to start preschool that october and never looked back.

My son who is 3 is mostly potty trained and that just happened too. He is mostly, because sometimes he will poop on himself because he doesnt want to go potty. He wants to be a baby.

My son is hard to tell if he is gifted, but my two oldest girls show all the signs. I am having the oldest tested soon. It can be different for each.

We just went through this two months ago (at 3 years, 2 months). Prior to this, our son refused all bribes, would not even sit on the potty or touch his pants, lest it suggest he might have to pull them down to use the toilet. The trick for us was that his best friend began potty training. And his best friend delighted in eating handfuls of M&Ms in front of our boy after success in the bathroom. We live in a home with very little (if any) candy and I think once candy became a tangible, visible reality, something clicked. So, we bought some M&Ms, put them in a jar in the bathroom and each time my husband and I went to the bathroom, we’d eat M&Ms in front of our son and talk about how delicious they were (a bit cruel perhaps, but we were desperate). Finally, he caved and was willing to sit on the potty. First, with his pants on and then finally (with more M&M rewards) with his pants off.

Once we had him on the potty with his pants off, we sat him in front of the television for what may have been hours. Again, television is something that is always limited here so giving him free reign was tremendous for him. And eventually, he peed in the potty! This was very exciting (more M&Ms).

The next thing that really helped seal the deal is that we invited over a classmate who was potty trained and decided that she wanted to use our son’s potty. This was exciting! And over the next two hours our son proceeded to pee in the potty of his own initiative about 10 times (often, right after his classmate or while urging her to do so on another potty).

So, we were on the right track but then M&Ms stopped working (“I’ve had enough M&M’s, thank you”), so we had to switch our currency. Luckily, we had some Girl Scout cookies in the house that did the trick. I think finding a currency that works really is key, as someone mentioned above. I was convinced my child was impossible to bribe but I was wrong. The final currency that we had to move to was to tell him that once he pooped in the potty (he was very against this idea, even though he was a master of his bowels), we’d let him move up into the loft portion of his bed (we have an Ikea loft bed with a stargazers canopy over it). This was incentive enough and it worked! Interestingly enough, allowing him to sleep up high under the canopy tent has also helped him sleep better. We went from near nightly wakings to wakings only about once a week!

There were accidents and battles of wills along the way but we got there. I’d say that within three weeks to a month, he was fully potty trained (although he still won’t pee at his preschool. He prefers to hold it). During these battle of wills, I would sometimes pick him up and put him on the toilet (while he fought me) and hold him there as soothingly as possible (saying kind words, telling him I loved him and had confidence in him) and eventually he’d let go and pee (but not always). The thing is that I knew he wanted to succeed at this, but was afraid of making mistakes or failing, I think. I also found that toilet seat covers worked wonders (or covering the seat with toilet paper) as it helped assuage his fear that he was going to fall into the toilet.

Good luck! Every kid is different but I hope some of this helps!

His constipation may be purely psychological, but I recommend you seek medical advice, because:

1) Chronic constipation can be a sign of other medical issues
2) Habitual use of laxatives can lead to a lifetime of dependence on them

I have second-hand personal experience with both. My DD gets blocked up due to lactose intolerance, so as long as she doesn't drink regular milk ("But it's so good, Daddy, I couldn't help myself!"), everything flows fine. We know instantly when she's been consuming regular milk, because her belly is distended and feels very solid, and her appetite drops off significantly. Once she passes that milk blockage, she's fine again.

My DW experienced chronic constipation since puberty due to endometriosis. That problem is now solved, but the years of laxative use have left her with no alternative but to continue using them, because her body's physiology has adjusted itself to this outside stimulus. There should be warnings on the products indicating this eventuality.

We've talked to his pediatrician about the long-term laxatives issue. She says that Miralax is not a big problem, and concern about habituation is why we use the Ex-Lax rarely. But I agree that it is a concern.

We've been trying to cut back on milk for him. Maybe we need to bite the bullet and get it out of the house for a few weeks.

I'd recommend buying a carton of a lactose-free alternative and observing its effect on your son, rather than throwing milk out altogether. In our case we identified lactose-intolerance as a possible culprit right away, because DW is intolerant, too. If there's no family history, it might not be his issue. However, there's little harm in trying it.

Lactose-free milk is simply regular milk with the lactase enzyme added, which breaks down the lactose molecules into a simpler sugar, giving the milk a sweeter flavor. Kids like sweet, so it shouldn't be an issue.