Potty Training Is My Favorite Part Of Parenting

I love potty training.

It’s not because I love cleaning poop off my lap. And it’s not because I have a magic method that works instantly — I do elimination communication, which means I start “potty training” (in the loosest possible sense) at birth and continue for at least a couple of years. So even though my kids are out of diapers around their second birthday, I spend the entirety of those two years actively teaching them to use the potty.

No, I love potty training because it teaches me so much about parenting. And really, about life.

Take the first time I tried to get my daughter to pee on cue. I’d been reading about this ”EC” concept since I was pregnant, and while it sounded like a great idea (with its big promises of working with your baby’s natural instincts, building her innate awareness of her body, transforming her poop into rainbows, and making her one with the universe), I was scared to actually try it. I didn’t think it would work.

But one day when she was two weeks old and had just woken from a nap, I took off her diaper, held her over the bathroom sink, and said, ”Ssss.” She peed immediately, and after I picked her up from where I’d dropped her in shock (kidding) and finished screaming and jumping up and down (not kidding), I was struck –for the first time — with the realization that she was an actual person.

She wasn’t just a doll that could cry. She had her own needs, her own desires, her own dreams, her own bodily functions. And even at two weeks old, she had something to say. I asked if she needed to pee, and she said yes. It was our first conversation.

Of course there were plenty of messes. There was that time she pooped on my mother-in-law’s welcome mat. And then the time she peed on the library carpet. But there were many other times when I felt incredibly, almost magically connected to her, just because I was paying attention. Because that’s the thing about potty training. It makes you pay attention.

It’s easy to not pay attention. Sure, when your first baby is a newborn, you spend more hours gazing into her eyes than you did with your first crush. But at some point, after 3,678 rounds of Ring Around the Rosy, the shine wears off. I can only play Thomas for about 4.7 minutes before my brain starts to implode. As a stay-at-home mom to a toddler and a preschooler, I put a lot of energy into persuading my kids to entertain themselves so I can do something else — anything else.

I don’t think that’s always a bad thing — independent play develops creativity, right? — but it’s not always a good thing, either. Given the choice, I might zone out on Facebook all day. But when the baby’s not wearing a diaper, that’s not a choice. Try it and see. Shit will get real.

Paying attention isn’t the only thing potty training taught me. It showed me how to help my kids succeed. When you approach the potty in a more conventional way, whether you introduce it after signs of readiness or just wait for your kid to spontaneously train himself, you don’t start until your child can handle at least most of the bathroom job. So when the inevitable mess happens, the natural response is to look at him, not yourself. You wonder which skill he’s missing, why he made a mistake. Even if you wait until he’s old enough to transition without a single puddle, very few parents will get to that point without thinking at least once, ”Seriously, kid? Are you ever going to get out of diapers?”

But with EC, that never crossed my mind. How could it? My baby wasn’t even walking yet. My knee-jerk reaction was never ”Why aren’t you getting this?” but rather ”Sorry I didn’t get you to the potty on time.” And as she grew, that mindset carried over. Which isn’t to say I blamed myself for a tantrum in the Target toy aisle. But I could usually pinpoint something I could have done better to prepare her. Deciding what I’ll do differently next time — pack more snacks or skip errands close to naptime — is more useful than lecturing her about what she did wrong.

As much as we want to influence our kids, parenting is like any other relationship: you can’t change the other person. You can help them, teach them, punish them, maybe even convince them. But you can only change yourself.

And as for the mess, which is supposed to be the really awful part about potty training? It bothered me at first.

With my daughter, my version of EC looked a lot more like training, with carefully timed bathroom opportunities, daily scorekeeping of ”catches” and ”misses,” and endless, inventive songs while she sat on the pot. But with my son, who’s now 14 months, I’ve been a lot more lax. It’s not unusual for me to turn my back just long enough to come back to him crouched on the floor, happily splashing in the puddle he just created. This doesn’t even gross me out (although maybe it should). But it turns out that urine is sterile (it even has medicinal properties). Baby poop hardly smells. And even when poop doesn’t quite make it to the potty, scooping it off the floor is a lot easier than scrubbing it off when it’s smeared all over a wiggling toddler butt.

Or maybe it’s just that after years of potty training, a little pee on the floor stops being a big deal. I’m pretty sure that’s a good thing. After all, there are few kid activities (Play-Doh, blocks, sandboxes, and even Thomas) that aren’t improved by a little mess. And after a couple of poop episodes, trails of sand and Play-Doh don’t look so bad.

Potty training isn’t an event for me anymore; it’s a lifestyle. A messy lifestyle, sure. One full of accidents, puddles, and germs. But that’s no different from any house with kids. EC just made it easier to accept.

I’ll clean my house after my kids move out. In the meantime, at least I’m paying attention.

(photo: Szasz-Fabian Ilka Erika / Shutterstock)