My son is the 4 y old who can't always hold a poo. He's fine no food intolerance, perfectly healthy, he just does 1 big poo a day with no set pattern-perfectly formed. Obviously he's just not good enough(Mila makes mental note to enforce 4 year old son to poo when it suits her).
Personally I think pull ups are the devils work, never used them with any of my 3.
I trained all of them pretty much around the 2 years and 3 months mark as that was when they were ready. All pretty easy except for the 1st hell fortnight, wee everywhere,but life goes on. I'm a SAHM of 3 all on my own all week,no way could I have stayed in for the whole fortnight each time.
As far as I can see this thread is turning into a pull ups/versus potty when needed.
Interestingly I've never used pull ups and after the 1st fortnight it was pretty much job done. I know others who have gone down the pull ups route and potty training took ages. It's a personal choice.
I couldn't afford to throw my money away on pull ups as had 3 under 3 but wouldn't condemn those that do. So in turn I don't think pull ups users should condemn those of us that go down the hell fortnight immediate potty use way of potty training either.
And whilst we're on the subject of humiliating children. My dc hate wetting their pants in public but have no worries about sitting on potties behind a pushchair in public. They would be horrified though if I forced them to use pull ups just for my convenience. Putting a pull up on a child to go shopping is not on when they no longer want to wear nappies.
As for germs being spread if you let a child use a potty in public you have no guarantees half the people shopping with you won't have washed their hands after using the toilet. I always carried wipes and used the fold up tie up bag potty. All food is packaged anyway and most trollies are mank anyhow.
It really is a sad antiseptic world if we need to enforce pull ups on children just so they don't wee in public. What did mothers do before? They apparently potty trained a lot earlier with no pull ups and the general public survived the odd child being caught short.Anyhow imho it's also far more hygienic to let a kid wee into a potty than to drag a desperate child across a packed supermarket spraying wee everywhere as it dribbles down their legs.
It's horses for courses, we all choose to potty train how it suits us so lets just cut the poor sods(in particular this poor soul who was spotted in Tesco)currently going through it a bit of slack.