Cognition is there but not emotionally ready?

[Anon778833]

I started potty training dd4 who is 2 years and 4 months on Monday. My older children trained later than this but dd4 is very intelligent and has an huge amount of language for her age. I thought it would be worth a try because she hates having her nappy changed.

Im very relaxed about it. I just sit her on every now and then which she seemed to be happy to do. Yesterday, she did a poo on there but she seems much more hesitant to let a wee out. Yesterday, she held onto the wee for about 4 hours. I think she let it all out at night time when I’d put her nappy back on for sleep.

This morning, she burst into tears when I put knickers on her so I just put everything away and took her to playgroup. Got home, had a nap. Then when she woke up, she started crying and asking where her potty is. She then wanted her bottoms off so she could sit on.

Holding wee is bad because it leads to UTIs. Has anyone else had a situation like this?

Yes. My son was 2 years 8 months when I first tried. Nursery said he was ready, sounds similar to your daughter in that his language is very advanced. We lasted 3 days but he really struggled and in the end I was holding him on the potty and he was screaming so we stopped.

We just started again 3 days ago, he is now 3 years 4 months (left longer due to various holidays ect) he is now cracking it pretty easily with no accidents.

You know your child but if I was me I'd leave it for a few months and try again.

Dd was like that. We figured out the issue was she was afraid of wetting herself after she had an initial accident so she just held it in. What we did was put her in pull-ups and convinced her to do a wee in the pull-up so she could see it wasn't going to run down her legs. We used pull-ups instead of underwear for a few days and she just asked up go to the toilet when she felt she needed to go and we reminded her frequently too. She moved on to proper underwear after 3 or 4 days and was fine.

I didn't even try my DS until 1 month before he turned 3. Even though everyone said he was ready months before. I am glad I did. Literally had a handful of accidents and nailed it within 3 days. I didn't put nappies on him during the night neither and haven't had 1 night accident. I have another DS who is 14 months but even if he is ready before I am not doing it. Will leave as late as possible to make it easier for everyone involved. I would leave her a while and try again. The fact it's this distressing for her probably means now isn't the right time.

Every child is different. My
eldest DS was trained within a week of turning 2, my other children were all about 2 and a half. I introduced the potty at bath time initially and went from there depending on their reaction to it. 3 of the 4 were very straightforward, the other took a little while to get the hang of it but we later realised his accidents were due to constipation, ironically he has less accidents than any other child I know now 🤷🏼‍♀️

DS was like this - he’d learned to hold on and wee in his nappy. So we had to re-teach him to wee in the potty.

We basically had to put him on the potty until he wet himself (which he was distressed about, and kept asking for his nappy), and then did a huge celebration (photos of the wee, brought teddy downstairs to see, the works) to reinforce that weeing in the potty was ok.

On the plus side he was basically dry from then onwards…..