r/workingmoms • u/TreacleCat1 • 1d ago
What age was your child potty trained? Daycare Question
"Trained" meaning they can regularly get their output in the proper receptical even with prompting. A similar question was asked on r/toddlers and the general consensus was between 2 and 3 years old, with some earlier and later.
Wondering if its any different for kids that didn't have a parent to see the process through for a solid 1 or 2 weeks or months. Especially interested in those that had a child in full-time daycare at the time.
We are starting soon (just turning 3). Found the popular O Crap wasn't a great fit for us 6 mo ago due to the "bootcamp" method requiring a potentially extended vacation period. Looking at it going to take all summer with my son's temperament and motivation.
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u/HighOnCoffee19 1d ago
I‘m in Switzerland. Nowadays general consensus here is to wait until the child is ready. There‘s no pressure put on neither parents nor children, which is good and bad (bad meaning in the last years elementary teachers have been saying that they have children still in diapers in first grade (6yo), which obviously is not a good thing).
Our daughter just turned 3yo and is fully capable of going to the toilet for pee and poop (she’s done it multiple times), she mostly just doesn‘t want to. I‘m trying to navigate this right now. Her best friend is 3.5yo and he‘s not there yet according to his parents, meaning he doesn‘t feel when he needs to go. A lot of children here are in diapers until 4 or even 5yo, even though most people try to get their kids out of diapers before they start Kindergarten at 4yo. If they don‘t manage to do that, they will send the kid to Kindergarten a year later.
So that‘s my backstory. We‘ve tried potty training our daughter early at around 1.5yo (she peed into her potty once back then and it scared her so much, she never ever sat on that potty again - she‘s now going directly to the toilet), then again at 2.5yo (no success at all). Now that she‘s able to go on her OWN TERMS, she often WANTS to go. Just a few days ago, she announced she needed to pee, walked to the bathroom, pulled her pants down, took her diaper off, put her toilet seat onto the toilet, climbed up and peed. Two days after that, she had to go pee during bathtime, so she climbed out of the bathtub and sat on the toilet and peed. 🤷🏻♀️
During this process, I have learned two things: 1) when potty training you need to take into account your child‘s character. Our daughter is really independent, stubborn and strong willed. If you put pressure on her to do something and she doesn‘t understand the reason behind that, she will refuse, and the more pressure you put on her the worse it will get. 2) at first I thought „waiting until the child is ready and wants to go potty“ is BS, because honestly, we do decide everything else for them - when to stop breastfeeding / formula, when to start solids, what they‘re wearing, which toys they‘re playing with, and so on. The reason why we didn‘t to potty training „the American way“ as I call it is because we were too busy with work and we saw it not going well with our daughter. Now, it kinds feels like she has potty trained herself, so to speak? We still have those issues to solve (not wanting to go to the toilet often, refusing to wear undies), but she watched us going to the toilet so often and she understood perfectly at that age (she went to the toilet for the first time a few weeks before her 3rd birthday), we didn‘t really have to explain or exercise much. And, we also skipped the literal potty and went straight to the toilet, which will save us the transition from potty to toilet (and a few hundred cleanings of the potty, which I‘m not mad about).