Live from Home Visiting Conference: Pressures of Potty Training

Jessica Stewart-Gonzalez: [00:00:00] Welcome back to The Parenting Brief. I’m your host, Jessica Stewart-Gonzalez. This week the Parenting Brief is coming to you live from the Strong Families Home Visiting Conference where home visiting professionals are enhancing their skills to better serve families. Right now we’re speaking with Dr. Heather Wittenberg. She’s a psychologist and mom of four, and she’s on a mission to make parenting fun and less stressful, even when potty training is the current parenting task. 

Dr. Heather Wittenberg: Absolutely. 

Jessica Stewart-Gonzalez: To start us off, can you just talk a little bit about the link between development and potty training? 

Dr. Heather Wittenberg: Thanks, Jessica.

Parents, understandably feel like potty training is just this gross task. To check off their parenting to-do list and like let’s get it over with and onto the next thing. But when they realize that it’s actually this incredibly important symphony of development happening right before their very eyes.

They [00:01:00] start to realize, wait a minute, this is something that we can enjoy and slow down and appreciate instead of just rushing through this stinky, gross task 

Jessica Stewart-Gonzalez: getting to the other end. I know. That’s what I was trying 

Dr. Heather Wittenberg: to the other end, so to speak. 

Jessica Stewart-Gonzalez: To do. Right, right. Exactly. This is something parents who listen to our show always want to know more about.

What are the biggest challenges you’ve seen parents face in potty training? 

Dr. Heather Wittenberg: The thing that’s really interesting about potty training is that. For about half of all toddlers, it tends to be pretty easy and straightforward, but for the other half, not so much. And that’s not to do with parents. It’s not to do with the child.

It has more to do with their inborn temperament and personality. And so parents feel guilty, they feel stressed, and they wonder, what did I do wrong? Or what did my child do wrong? And that’s the whole basis of my potty personalities, which is that if you can. Figure out the potty personality of your child.

You can [00:02:00] custom design the potty training approach that will work best for them and decrease so much frustration. 

Jessica Stewart-Gonzalez: Parents seem to always be fighting that I need to get my child potty trained due to childcare or preschool versus the, my kid doesn’t really seem ready for potty training. What advice do you have parents who are navigating that in between space?

Dr. Heather Wittenberg: There’s so much pressure on parents, whether it’s from preschool, potty training deadlines, or whether it’s from in-laws. Saying, how come you’re, you were outta diapers at 18 months? How come your child isn’t yet, or from the internet, which you look online? And the trendy thing these days is the three day potty training method.

Mm-hmm. Which again, works pretty well for about half of all toddlers. So there’s so much pressure on parents today, and if they can instead. Really focus on what’s going on with this incredible, beautiful developmental process with [00:03:00] their child. It’s gonna go a lot better and, and if they succumb to the pressure, it’s actually gonna backfire and they’re gonna have consequences to deal with later, and nobody wants that.

So taking a deep breath, stepping back, supporting your child where they are is really the way to success. 

Jessica Stewart-Gonzalez: That is amazing advice. Thank you so much for joining us, and thank you to our listeners for following along with us this week. We’ll be back again later today with more conversation to help you and your family thrive.