Good Parenting

It can be quite frustrating, as a parent, for you to have to deal with your toddler’s regression in toilet training.

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Just when you thought everything was fine, and that your toddler was making significant potty training progress by leaps and strides, your child all of the sudden, without prior notice, starts regressing back to diapers again, whether consciously or unconsciously.

So much for celebrating. It looks like it’s time to buy yet another box of diapers.

It may seem as though all of those hours, days, and weeks laboriously chasing after your child, sitting him or her on the toilet, and cleaning up messy “accidents”, has not paid off, and all of that effort has been literally “flushed down the toilet” (pun intended)!

What happened? Why has your child regressed? Why has your child gone back to the diapers, even after having already been successfully potty trained?

Becoming toilet trained is an acquired skill that your child must master, just like crawling and walking once were. However, it is entirely possible, and not unreasonable, that your child may, for whatever reason, decide to revert back to the familiar comfort zone of diapers, even though he or she has mastered the potty.

So what should you do in this situation? Are you back to square one again? Does your child need to be retrained again from scratch?

It can sure seem that way for many parents whose children have gone through regression in toilet training, being that it can take several days or weeks to get your child back on track again!

What you must absolutely NOT do, as a parent, is give up, or become overly stressed out or frustrated. And most importantly, you must not view this setback as a FAILURE.

Rather, you should seize this OPPORTUNITY and use it to your advantage, to “seal the deal”, and get your child potty trained once and for all!

The key to helping your child overcome regression in toilet training is to be able to pinpoint and to be able to understand the triggers that may have inadvertently caused your child to enter this regressive phase to begin with.

Once you fully understand what the triggers are, then you will be able to further adapt, refine, and fine-tune your potty training tactics to help you help your child overcome this hurdle.

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This entry was posted on Monday, December 21st, 2009 at 2:12 pm and is filed under Good Parenting.