Are your children’s vaccines up to date?

Set a reminder

Please or to access all these features

Behaviour/development

Talk to others about child development and behaviour stages here. You can find more information on our development calendar.

Struggling to potty train almost 4 year old

2 replies

SaltySpitoon · 08/03/2026 12:49

Hi all. DS will be 4 in June and we are tearing our hair out trying to potty train him. We have tried several times over the past year and used several different methods (going cold turkey from nappies, bribing with chocolate/sweets/toys, taking to the toilet every half an hour etc) and nothing has worked. He either gets distressed and starts crying and says no, or he just shows no interest! When he's wearing trousers with no nappy he doesn't even seem to notice/care that he has wet himself. He doesn't tell us that he needs the toilet. He does show interest in sitting on the toilet, flushing it, washing his hands etc but he has never actually done anything on it.

He does have a speech delay for which he's under SALT, could this possibly affect things?

I don't know if he's simply being stubborn, or whether he's genuinely not ready. I don't want to push it if it's the latter, but equally he's supposed to be starting school in September and I'm starting to feel the pressure a little. He has an older sister who was really easy to potty train and was reliably trained day and night by DSs age, but I understand all kids are different and she didn't have a speech delay.

Did anyone else have this?

Thank you ☺️

OP posts:
Are your children’s vaccines up to date?
SleafordSods · 09/03/2026 17:51

If he is slow to potty train and also has speech delay, have Nursery raised any concerns?

It does seem unusual for a DC of this age not to even recognise that they’re wet.

Was it the HV who referred him to SaLT avd is she due to seem him again soon?

1995SENNDMUM · 10/03/2026 10:37

Just a thought and it might well not be, but as they've a speech delay it could be pointing towards autism being a possibility as sometimes kids with it struggle to potty train as they have an issue with their internal senses so they actually can't as easily tell when they need to pee/drink etc. Has their health visitor or nursery ever mentioned anything else or done an ASQ-SE to see what they scored on that?

New posts on this thread. Refresh page