Vanessa knew that potty training would be challenging, but she had no idea that regression was often a part of moving forward.
Vanessa's Story
"We kind of had this idea that they potty train right away and everything's perfect."
When Lauren started to potty train at 30 months, we thought it'd be a piece of cake. Everybody was saying that their kids are so great and it's so easy and everything's perfect. Next thing we knew we had accidents, and it wasn't as easy as everybody said, and it wasn't as natural as everybody said.
"We thought she was trained, but then we regressed, big time.?"
She would go 30 days without an accident and then all of a sudden pee in her pants - multiple times in one day, not just once. Or she would poop in her pants. Probably the most embarrassing time that she had an accident was at a birthday party, where she was playing with a bunch of kids. She peed her pants ,and then we had to follow where she had been and clean up her pee trail. That was when we first started getting mad at her. She had gone 30 days, she had been telling us, and then she just stopped.
"Everything came to a head."
Everybody was getting frustrated at each other. There was a lot of yelling by everybody involved. She was saying on a daily basis, "I'm never going to do that again," as she was having an accident. It was getting worse and worse and worse, and she was peeing more and more and more, and pooping in her pants more and more and more.
You get really frustrated because you feel like they're doing it to spite you or they're angry about it. We got frustrated and we lost our tempers, and it didn't get better - it got worse. She'd poop in her bed, and when we'd ask her why, she would say, "Oh, just 'cause."
That wasn't her. She's never had a two-word answer for anything in her life.
"We realized it was as much our fault as hers."
I asked some other parents what to do and they said to put her back in diapers, but my pediatrician said, "Don't. Don't put her back in diapers, that's not going to help her. What you need to do is just start from the beginning again and retrain her."
That's when I realized, wait a minute, it's not retraining her, it's retraining us. She had had a lot of success early on, but then she started having all this pressure. It was our fault that she was getting this out of hand. It was our fault that she was losing control of her ability to tell us when she had to go to the bathroom. Not to say that kids can't handle pressure, because they can, and not to say that she won't have pressure in her life, because she will, but it's different when you're three and it's coming from your parents. We realized how awful is it for us as parents to say, "Your birthday party is cancelled because you can't go to the bathroom."
"Taking the pressure off was a relief for everyone."
Once we went back to congratulating her and taking her to the potty all the time and giving her support, we found that we had fewer and fewer accidents. Everything sort of worked out.
It was really special to see her be successful, and it was nice to see her proud of herself again. It was a big moment in our house, for her and for us as parents.
"There is no failing."
We hadn't had kids before, and we didn't realize that it was okay to start over. Nobody had explained to us that kids go in cycles, and it's okay to step back. We kept feeling like we were failing - we were failing her, we were failing us, we were failing. In reality, there is no failing. It's all part of moving forward.
