In the Chinese culture it is accepted as the norm to attempt to potty train your child early, even though that is kind of also changing now thanks to successful advertising of disposable diapers. So even when my daughter was as young as 3 months old, I had plenty of family and friends that were asking me if I had started to potty train her. Being an ambitious parent, I read up on books about elimination communication and started out my journey at 5 months old. After a couple day of naked time observation, I figured out a rough pattern and her signs. It was a great success the moment I started, my daughter gets it, well, either that or I am just so good at catching her moments, she also fusses right before she wants to pee also. She pees within seconds everytime I put her on the potty chair, even though I had trouble catching the poop, but I was excited, thinking she will be potty trained in no time.
Unfortunately the story doesn’t go on smoothly from here. Soon, I find myself stressed out being obsessed with watching her signals. I know they say you are not suppose to stress out catching every pee, but with her peeing every 20 to 40 minutes after nursing, and nursing every 2-3 hours, plus surprise poop every once a while, and occasionally peeing 10 minutes after nursing instead. I find myself doing absolutely nothing besides staring at her and putting her on the potty. This is definitely not worth it, I could have been reading a story to her, playing with her, or stimulating her brain in some way. I decided to just do the potty in the morning time. Then my laziness kicked in, the morning time started to become shorter and shorter. Soon, I decided to just catch the first pee after waking up from sleep and naps, then just the first one in the morning. My daughter soon got tired of this game, she has long stopped giving me obvious signs before going, and she refuses to sit on the potty at all, arching her back screaming. Not wanting to turn this into a stressful even for her, I finally got so tired and just gave up completely and wrap her back into disposable diapers (yes, I even ditched the cloth diapers, because at this point I did not even want to know that she peed) and decide to take a long break for both of us. Meanwhile, a friend of mine that started elimination communication at the same time as I did is having great success, ironically, she didn’t start out as smoothly as I did in the beginning. After her encouragement, I decided to resume. By this time my daughter is already close to one year old. However, this time, I decided to take a different approach. I didn’t attempt to put my daughter on her potty again, but I did put her into cotton training pants. Every time she wets herself, I would tell her that she peed and immediately change it for her. I did this for a while in order for her to get use to feeling dry. Then I started putting her on the potty with her pants still on and on top of my lap, this is for her to get use to sitting on the potty again. After she is ok with the potty chair again, I took her to the bathroom with me, I would put her on the potty with her training pants still on and I would sit on the toilet and show her how to do it. Funny how that actually worked, she would actually pee with me. Then I started putting her on without pants. Now she actually will go in the potty if I take her in at the correct timing, and she will tell me if she wets herself, but definitely not to the point of telling me before wetting herself. It is still a lot of hit and miss at this point for me, but I do think all this training does work a little bit. At the very least, she definitely knows what the potty is for and is able to go on it. But I think the majority of the work of elimination communication is still very exhausting on me. I often think, will I do this again if I have another child? I think I might try it from birth the next time around and see how that goes, maybe if I did it since birth it would be easier? But I have a feeling it is probably going to be a lot of hard work still. The truth is it is so much easier to just wrap her up in diapers, ignore it and not think about it. I really hope by the time she is potty trained I can look back and say this is all worth it, but for now I really can’t make the call yet, but we shall see in a few months.
No comments:
Post a Comment