My Girl Wants to Potty All the Time

As many of you parents know,

incentives are a good way to get a kid to follow through with a task. An old fashioned reward system can do wonders to help get a chore done or a vegetable eaten. Toilet training is no exception.

At our house, it’s all about the big prize. In this case, it’s a bike (or a trike in her case, but she likes to call it a bike). We’ve set up a system so that whenever Finley can successfully go to the potty, she gets a sticker. And once her special little chart is full of stickers, she can get a bike. Pretty straight forward and easy for her to grasp. In fact, it’s working like a charm… well, sort of.

Of course with all great plans there are a few minor glitches, we didn’t seem to count on. The good news is that she is doing a great job of letting us know when she has to pee and is getting to the potty on time and doing her thing. She gets very excited when she goes and is very helpful with the disposal and clean up.

On the other hand, it seems like she’s more intent on the stickers than she is about accomplishing the peeing. Just this evening, she went pee three times in a two-hour span. It’s good that she lets us know, but racking up five to seven stickers in a day is not really the lesson we’re trying to teach, here.

And there are the times she wants to get a sticker so badly that she thinks she can go pee and ends up sitting on the pot for five to ten minutes with no results. She’s also been known to try and sneak a second sticker from the sticker sheet when she’s collecting her reward.

Sure, it’s good to have her be excited, but it needs to be about what she’s done, not what she’s going to get. The problem is, I’m not sure a two-year old will comprehend the educational value as opposed to the prize value.

The conversation, I imagine, would go something like this:

Daddy
“Finley, it’s nice that you really want the bike, but you need to work on going pee-pee and poopy all the time.”

Finley

“I need a pink bike.”

Daddy

“Yes, I know. But, let’s try to see if we can go pee-pee and poopy like a big girl.”

Finley

“Or a blue bike.”

The ultimate goal – as with any sort of toilet training – is to get her to understand the importance of going on her own. And even though we are burning through stickers, she’s getting into the good habit we’re trying to teach. We’re just going to have to work on a transition from ultimate prize gathering to pride in personal accomplishment. Especially after the bike arrives. Either that, or we’ll need to get a bigger chart.