Potty Training Troubles

People joke that when you become a parent, you start spending a lot of your time thinking about poop, but it's the kind of thing that one doesn't really understand until one lives it. When your kid wears diapers, of course there's a lot of poop, but I found it really took over our lives when potty training came along. When your kid just poops in a diaper, it's easy if unpleasant to deal with; when your kid can poop in their underwear, you spend so much time and energy thinking about this.

We've been potty training since the summer. Son One sometimes has good patches, sometimes rough. There was a point, I swear to God, where he would just stop doing what he was doing and go off to go "pod." At some point, he stopped doing this, and just started going in his underwear again. Now, he's much better at holding it than he once was. So if you get him on the potty periodically, things can be fine, because he'll just go then.

In fact, he seems to put superhuman strength into holding it, especially his poops. When we traveled home for Christmas, he didn't poop for days, because he didn't want to poop in an unfamiliar environment. He would just sit on the potty and do nothing. "I am trying," he insists. "Trying means not pooping." "No," I say, "trying means doing your best to make the poop come." "No!" he screams. "I don't want to do my best!"

Well, clearly.

He clearly doesn't like it when he pees his pants or gets poop in his underwear, but he is also often unwilling to actually do anything proactive about it. We've tried different reward systems: candy with his after-dinner snack if he has no accidents all day, now we're doing stickers every time he goes in the potty, with Paw Patrol toys every fourteen stickers.

The first day stickers went great. He actually looked at the sticker chart once, said, "I have to pee," then ran into the bathroom and did it. 

Nothing like that has ever happened again. We're back to having to make him go in to the bathroom, though at least the stickers sometimes reduce the resistance. Sometimes. Other times, he adopts his usual obstinate mode. "Don't you want a sticker?" I'll ask. "You'll get a Paw Patrol toy." "I don't want a Paw Patrol toy! I don't like Paw Patrol!" This past Saturday, where he managed to poop in his underwear four times by 10am... well, to say I felt frustrated would be a massive understatement. I think that if the morning starts off bad, alas, the rest of the day struggles to recover from it, and he stays stuck in a negative mindset. Sunday was not too bad; he got a lot of stickers, though he still had one accident.

On the other hand, I remember feeling much more frustrated last semester. I don't remember exactly when it was, but I remember venting to Hayley that I felt like a prisoner in my own home. We couldn't go anywhere and do anything because the chance of an accident was too high, and I was starting to feel a lot of resentment. Now, I don't feel that so much, and we've had a number of successful outings with minimal problems. Like I said, he can devote superhuman strength to holding in his pees and poops—the issue more seems to be when we're at home, and he's just playing with magnetic tiles, then he doesn't bother.

I guess I feel like there's a light at the end of the tunnel, which upon reflection seems a bit irrational because I also feel like we've largely plateaued. But if being irrational keeps me going through this, then I will be a bit irrational. At least I am not as irrational as he is! (Seriously! If you could just reason with a three year old, how nice would that be.)

(If your kid was a dream to potty train, please do not let me know. If you have advice, I guess I would listen, but I feel like I have almost certainly heard it before. If you want to commiserate, or tell me that after nine months of pooping in his underwear, your kid did figure it out, that would be all right.)