Is my son not ready for potty training?

[GreenLemonade]

DS is 2 years 8 months old and I would like to start potty training this bank holiday weekend.

Over the last few days we’ve been reading stories and talking about potty training. Whenever I tell him he’ll be doing wee wees on a potty soon or ask him if he wants to use a potty, he says no because "he’s still little and needs to grow bigger". I’m not sure where he heard this idea from, possibly nursery. He seems anxious about potty training.

He doesn’t like walking around bare bottom. If I suggest some nappy free time, for example before a bath, he gets upset and attempts to put on a nappy (we use pull ups).

He’s showing some signs of potty readiness: he tells me if he wants to do a poo and hides to do it, sometimes he asks to have his nappy changed. If we go together to the loo he sits on the potty and pretends to wee. However, he’s still not able to pull down his pants.

Does he sound ready? I’m worried he’s not ready and it will be a disaster. I don't want to put him off if he's already anxious about the process but we have to start sooner or later.

It's a historical fact that the concept of "readiness" was invented by the Pampers marketing team. There's no scientific basis for readiness.

No scientific basis, but years of experience let’s you know to look for the signs of when they are ready.
Trying to force it before they are can lead to real issues.
Most boys are not ready until about 3 years of age.
And I can speak to 25 years of childminding to support this.

My son was a little older than 2, and would poo regularly before the school run. One day I put him on the potty. Didn't make a big deal. He did it. We just kept up with that one time, and all other times was a pull up. Gradually we built on that, and one week I did the three day training and we continued from there.

We've had regressions, we still have accidents sone days and none on others. It's far better than changing nappies 3 or 4 times a day. He still wears pull ups at night and on some outings where monitoring him is difficult. He used to tell us when he wanted to wee, but now has stopped. Hes better at telling us re a poo. We are working on the communication actively.

He will wee whenever we put him on and try and stick to a 3 hour window maximum. He's in pants at nursery the whole day and usually does well.

There's no right or wrong time. My advice is focus on that one regular time, and work on that first. My son would use ipad in the beginning to sit for long intervals but we weaned him off and now he asks for books.

I don't expect him to be fully potty trained until he's 4 (including nights) but confident he will be in a good place for day time come Sep. He's 3 in August.

It's not a perfect situation but the training kind of started unexpectedly and I felt I had to keep going.

Hope something here helped!

Definitely go for it ! I trained both my boys at 2. I told them we'd be saying bye bye to nappies and just went for it. I agree with previous posters and think it's one of those things you need to decide when you are ready to train and that's that. I found after about 2 weeks and the novelty wore off bit boys regressed a little but if this happens just keep going and they will come around. My friend decided to wait because her son wasn't ready and showing no signs of wanting to train. He's now 5 and not toilet trained and she's having a terrible time because he's older he's so used to using the nappy he's just refusing ( no SEN) . It can get harder as they get older and more even strong willed. Good luck 👍

That's exactly the age my son was when we stopped using nappies, and we did it over a long weekend too. Started at lunchtime on the Friday (wore his last nappy to toddler group that morning) and then we didn't leave the house til the Tuesday morning when he went to nursery in his pants!

He never had a bare bottom at any point, he'd have hated that. Wore his new pants and trousers and potty was within about a meter of him the whole weekend. As he was wearing clothes they soaked up most of the wee if there was an accident and I just chucked them in washing machine. So overall there was nowhere near the mess I feared (I imagined wee and poo everywhere!)

He wasn't happy at all with pants at first but managed to distract him enough to get them on! He had several accidents on the Friday, a few on the Saturday and then he was pretty much accident free at home. Had frequent accidents at nursery for a few weeks but they encouraged us to stick with pants as he was doing so well out of nursery.

We didn’t bother with readiness either, we just cracked on about the same age. No nappy bare butt, let him wear shorts of he wants but just take him to the potty regularly. The first few days were an utter mess but they get the idea.

also used the “oh crap” method.

3, for a typically developing child, is absurd, and lazy. There is no evidence for your assertion about "real issues," otherwise we'd be hearing from all the places that practise EC from birth.

50 years ago, most children- boys and girls- were trained by 18 months.

Now we have children starting school not fully trained.

Children are not born wearing nappies and many countries don't use them. We train them to do something unnatural and carry around their own waste and then we claim that they're not "ready" to do what is most natural, because it's a lot of work and mess and inconvenient, despite the damage to the environment that 3 years of nappies does and the risks to bowel and bladder health.