Where to train

THE MAJORITY OF advice that I have read advise parents that potty training should be done in the summer, so that the child can spend most of his day running around outside without his pants on. This is fine if your child just happens to be ready for potty training at that time of the year and the weather permits. I personally can’t remember ever training a child this way as I have always taken the view that potty training is about exchanging nappies for pants, and that should be done from day one.

While I have often allowed a child to run around the first day or so without pants I don’t see the point of allowing it to go on any longer than that. To me the whole concept of potty training is that the child learns the difference between wet and dry, and that is much easier to achieve when wearing pants. It also means that when accidents happen indoors most of the pee is soaked up into the pants and not the carpet.

Obviously there will be times when your child leaves a puddle on the floor, so during the first couple of days of training try to restrict training to just a couple of rooms. I suggest starting off the first morning of training in the kitchen so you can keep a close eye on the child while you are doing the chores. This also means that you can involve the child in things like washing up or baking and if accidents happen they are easily cleaned up.

When moving to another room with carpets I would put the potty on an old rug or doubled-up thick towel, because in my experience accidents nearly always happened near the potty when the child just didn’t get there quite quick enough.