Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:OP here - thanks for the advice, we started oh crap on the Saturday and didn't have any success so far over the weekend, staying fully naked. She wasn't showing any cues until the accident had already started. A lot of mess to clean up but hoping we'll get some progress on the first step soon, we have the week to dedicate to this.

I was wondering if I could put her on the toilet at regular intervals so that link might start and we can praise some success?

Omg yes put her on the toilet every hour or two! I cannot imagine potty training a child without regularly prompting them to go for the first month at least.

OP here, thank you. I've tried to follow OH crap perfectly and was trying to look for cues, I didn't know if just having her sit there for a while was the best option

Anonymous wrote:OP here - thanks for the advice, we started oh crap on the Saturday and didn't have any success so far over the weekend, staying fully naked. She wasn't showing any cues until the accident had already started. A lot of mess to clean up but hoping we'll get some progress on the first step soon, we have the week to dedicate to this.

I was wondering if I could put her on the toilet at regular intervals so that link might start and we can praise some success?

Omg yes put her on the toilet every hour or two! I cannot imagine potty training a child without regularly prompting them to go for the first month at least.

OP here - thanks for the advice, we started oh crap on the Saturday and didn't have any success so far over the weekend, staying fully naked. She wasn't showing any cues until the accident had already started. A lot of mess to clean up but hoping we'll get some progress on the first step soon, we have the week to dedicate to this.

I was wondering if I could put her on the toilet at regular intervals so that link might start and we can praise some success?

My youngest always peed in underwear but learned quickly naked. I would even take him places with no underwear, just pants, for a few weeks until he stopped peeing in underwear.

Anonymous wrote:I've been changing my 3-year-old 8-10 times a day and it's really adding up money-wise. For those of you with 3-year-olds who haven't been potty trained yet, how often do you change them? I'm starting to wonder if I should wait a bit longer between changes, as I currently change her as soon as she has even a small accident. I was hoping we'd be ready for potty training by now, but she's not showing any signs beyond being able to pull her pants up and down and using some language. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

It's time to make her use the potty and at this age you don't need to wait for her signs. Unless she's SN, she's capable of doing it. Right now because she's so old and you've waited so long, she thinks she's the boss. I have been through this and I now know better. I should have started it at age 2 and not wait till 3.

I did the no pants no diaper method and set the baby potty where they had easy access. If they had the temerity to do it on the floor, punishment. They learned quick.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:OP here thank you again for the advice, we've not been leaving the diapers until full, so will change a lot less frequently.

There's no developmental delays, we've had some tests to see if there's a reason she's got no idea when she wees or poos but nothing came up from them.

We can try training again, we found it quite difficult as we were ready to praise any success but we had none, when we've tried it ( we have tried twice)

OP, you're doing fine. My DD was very similar -- we tried several times to potty train before it really started to take, and Oh Crap was totally useless for us. It just took more trial and error and repeating the training for her than it does for some other kids.

People on these boards can be really mean about kids who are potty training at 3. They trained their kids early, and this becomes the pinnacle of their parenting achievement and they are eager to insult other families who might have started later for whatever reason, or have a harder-to-train kid. It's actually sad. My kids are well past potty training age and I cannot imagine being smug about something so basic at this point. Trust me, in a few years all of this will be a distant memory and will not matter at all anymore, it's just somewhat stressful and pressure-filled in the moment because it's a major milestone for the age. You'll get there.

Definitely!! But the way OP presented it was not that she was having trouble potty training but that she hadn’t done it yet. That’s why she’s getting lots of advice to potty train, which is reasonable!

It's totally fine to advise OP to potty train, it sounds like she needed the encouragement. That's different from berating her for not successfully trained her kid yet, that's uncalled for.

Oh forgot to mention, OP: have you tried incentives? When we did Oh Crap, we gave an M&M for every single pee and poop in the potty. I put them in a glass jar right next to the potty so she could see the reward at all times. We weaned off the candy after about a week. I think this was the reason for our success.

If Oh Crap doesn’t work we did a method with our DD when she was 3.25 called Ready! Set! Potty! It’s actually developed for kids with developmental disabilities (which DD has) but DH and I remarked that we are sure it would’ve worked on DS too who trained at 2.25 through oh crap and is neurotypical. I think DS would’ve enjoyed this method more.

Basically you have a big party the night before with a whole theme that your child loves—the party is for potty training! Hooray! The gift is underwear that matches the theme. You have a cake and everything. Then while they are sleeping you decorate your bathroom to match the exciting theme, including potty toys, etc. There are other steps too. It’s a quick read. Honestly it felt a bit absurd but she LOVED it. It could’ve just been age but we had two failed attempts at Oh Crap and were feeling disheartened. I took a week off of work to train her and she was good to go after that (we did have to make sure to tell her to go). BTW she showed no real signs of readiness.

Poop took a bit longer (a month or so). But she only pooped once a day at home and never at school so it was okay. We also had, as another poster has suggested, her get changed standing up in the bathroom. She even learned to request a pull up and poop in the bathroom. It just took her a bit to poop in the toilet. But once she did, she was fully trained even overnight.

Also, like others have said, you don’t need to change her as frequently. We maybe used 4-5 diapers a day at that age.

Hi OP, lots of advice here so I just wanted to add that I think “readiness” is totally unnecessary. My daughter was exactly like yours and yet trained quickly and successfully in a day with Oh Crap (I didn’t read it but basically naked and feet from a potty for a weekend).

Mine used to pee tiny amounts 8-15 times a day and showed zero interest in potty training or awareness of when she’d peed. She was happy to sit indefinitely in a dirty diaper. It turned out this has no impact on whether she was actually ready to potty train. I think your ped could be wrong on this and you should not wait.

OP instead of focusing on recognizing the urge to go, try focusing on the action of releasing. Practice sitting on the potty and blowing a pinwheel. Make her laugh on the potty by doing something ridiculous. Talk about opening your pee gate. Demonstrate. Then load her with liquids, put her on the potty, and turn on the taps. Big reward for any pee. Maybe they need to go from the other direction, as it were. Understanding what it feels like to actually pee could help with understanding what it feels like to need to pee.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:OP here thank you again for the advice, we've not been leaving the diapers until full, so will change a lot less frequently.

There's no developmental delays, we've had some tests to see if there's a reason she's got no idea when she wees or poos but nothing came up from them.

We can try training again, we found it quite difficult as we were ready to praise any success but we had none, when we've tried it ( we have tried twice)

OP, you're doing fine. My DD was very similar -- we tried several times to potty train before it really started to take, and Oh Crap was totally useless for us. It just took more trial and error and repeating the training for her than it does for some other kids.

People on these boards can be really mean about kids who are potty training at 3. They trained their kids early, and this becomes the pinnacle of their parenting achievement and they are eager to insult other families who might have started later for whatever reason, or have a harder-to-train kid. It's actually sad. My kids are well past potty training age and I cannot imagine being smug about something so basic at this point. Trust me, in a few years all of this will be a distant memory and will not matter at all anymore, it's just somewhat stressful and pressure-filled in the moment because it's a major milestone for the age. You'll get there.

Definitely!! But the way OP presented it was not that she was having trouble potty training but that she hadn’t done it yet. That’s why she’s getting lots of advice to potty train, which is reasonable!

Anonymous wrote:Wow, I really don't know. That's like 18 months after all three of my children were out of diapers already.

NP but I also prioritized potty training for my first 3 but life got hard having more kids. Now I have a 3.5 year old in diapers. Younger me would be horrified, current me is humbled.

Haven’t read though the thread yet, as I’m at work at the moment. But 8 to 10 diapers a day seems excessive.

Just to clarify, you’re using diapers, right? Not training pants/pull ups?

With a modern disposable diaper, there’s no way you need to change it after every little pee.

When my son was that age (he trained a month before turning 4) we did:

1. Diaper right after he woke up for the day
2. Before lunch, around 11am or so.
3. Before nap, around 1pm.
4. After he woke up from said nap (diaper was usually soaked, he was/is a big sleeping pee’r)
5. Sometime in the evening, around 4-5pm or so.
6. Fresh diaper right before bed.

Give or take one or two, that was pretty typical for us. No way I’d change him if there was just a little bit of pee, he’d mostly go during nap/nighttime for the most part anyways.

OP, the only time you need to change her diapers immediately after a pee is if she currently has a diaper rash or some other issue down there. Otherwise, modern diapers can handle not being changed for 3 hours (assuming no poops).

Anonymous wrote:OP here -thanks for the advice, the diapers have lasted longer today so that's really helped.

Re: potty training. We're going to commit to oh crap tomorrow. We're going to give it another proper attempt, however if it doesn't work we'll go straight to plan B or plan C with the other recommendations here. Everything crossed it works. I'm thinking from this thread I've waited for this for far too long and she should have been trained before 3 if I did it properly

Good luck and don't second guess. Lot's of kids train at 3. And for most families, potty training is a bit messy (literally and figuratively) and takes a while -- it's a process. You are in the process. There is some number of kids who train quickly and early with a program like Oh Crap. Great! But I know just as many families (including mine) who did Oh Crap at the same age with the same vigor and the kids Did. Not. Like. It. The Oh Crap lady can claim that readiness doesn't matter and that any kid can be trained, but I am telling you from experience -- this is bull. Some kids really just do not have the capacity to know when they have to go, or the trigger is too close in time to them releasing the pee, for a system like Oh Crap to work at 2 or 2.5. And kids have different physiology, so even something as basic as their ability to hold it for 30 seconds to get to a training potty might vary at that age because they are so small. Also some kids are prone to constipation or other issues that can disrupt the signals that help them to train. All of this is common, and normal.

Don't beat yourself up about "waiting." It honestly sounds like you are on a fairly normal path to training but still in the thick of it and figuring out what's going to work, plus also getting more serious about it after approaching it more casually for a time. This is normal and nothing to feel bad about. Potty training is a pain until one day suddenly it's not, and then you move on. You're fine.