[wanfamily]

Thanks - I'm inspired and I'm going for it from today. We've just had a big 'you did a wee wee on the toilet' ice - cream celebtration. (She managed it this morning. She didn't have a nappy on at the time, so it may have helped). Going to go shopping for proper knickers just like mummy's in abit and then will have the mop and washing machine on standby. Here goes...!

[carang]

the first day we put our boy into underwear, he wet 5 pairs in about 3 hours!

the next day, he was virtually dry with only 1 or 2 accidents.

by the end of the week, he was pretty much trained, at least for the wee... took us a little longer for the poo. i think he didn't want to dirty his potty. but once he finally got one in the pot, he was ok

[jenayds]

My son is also 3 and we also did cold turkey a few weeks ago, with stickers etc etc. He does fine if we take him to the toilet at regular intervals (every couple of hours for him). But if we don't tell him to go, he just wees in his pants. We tried telling him that part of being a big boy is knowing when you need to go, and that we wouldn't remind him so much anymore, and he just weed his pants 4 times in a row. After two weeks of this we went back to nappies for a while.

Now I'm not sure when to try big boy pants again. He's apparently supposed to be toilet trained for kindy in a couple of weeks. Can I just send him in pull ups? He's unlikely to poo when he's at kindy, and he can perform on demand when someone sits him on the toilet (they have toilet time in the schedule). So I think it won't be a big problem - guess we'll have to wait and see.

[Kly]

jenayds, you may find that your son will train a lot quicker once he has started kindie. As you mentioned, the school will take them to the toilet on a schedule and he will copy what the other children are doing. Also the aunties and teachers are very helpful.
I have a friend who never really toilet trained her two girls, but sent them to preschool at about two and a half years old. The aunties and teachers at the school took them to the toilet on a schedule, the girls copied other children and they were trained within a week! I'm not saying this will happen to every child, but I think it will definately help for your son to see other children doing the same thing.

Also, you might need a chat with your sons school as some schools don't allow children to be in pull ups when they start K1/nursery (our sons school doesn't allow this). So you might need to put some extra trousers in his bag just in case.

[theabeth]

I'm expecting my first child, but worked in the behavioral field for many years. When potty training children, we had to break things down to very small steps. Like the other ladies said, find a week that you can concentrate solely on potty training. You can start with taking him to the potty every hour and keep him hydrated. A reward system really seems to work whether it is praise, stickers or candy. What I've also done is placed some cereal (Fruit Loops) in the toilet which made it fun for the boy to aim for. These things usually make the potty training fun for the child rather than aversive.

Good Luck!!