Are your children’s vaccines up to date?

Set a reminder

Please or to access all these features

Potty training

Is your child ready for potty training at nursery? Here's the place for all your toilet training questions.

Great when naked, doesn’t ‘get’ pants

4 replies

Maraudingmarauders · 19/07/2025 11:48

Hi all,
Im looking for some advice on the move to underwear during potty/toilet training. Our 22month old is absolutely fantastic at using the potty when naked - we’ve been doing this about 2 weeks with the good weather and he runs around naked, will ask to use the potty or go by himself. He is about 95% perfect, only accidents happen when he’s deep in playing and seems to not notice. He loves the potty, really keen to use it. Cries when we put a nappy on him because “mummy potty wee wee” but the problem we are having is that as soon as we put a pair of pants on him (fun ones he’s picked out) he just acts like they’re a nappy and we have constant accidents. Sometimes he will sit on the potty and wee through them. This morning he pooed in them (he hasn’t pooed in the potty yet).

We’ve tried explaining to him, are trying to teach him to pull them down but he gets really
possessive of them and gets upset when we try to take them off to sit him on the potty and then more upset when we try to put them back on (when we try the every 15 minutes thing).
any ideas for this next step? I’m not worried about it not being 3 days and done, and whilst I will consider stopping and trying again later I’d rather not as I think he’s really getting the concept. We’ve been led by him rather than the other way around - taking off his nappy, telling us when he does something, tries to sit on the toilet etc etc.

Nursery are fully supportive and have said if we want to go cold turkey on nappies they’re happy to facilitate so long as we send in lots of clothes, but this morning his went through three pairs in half an hour! Which just feels like we are setting him up to fail so I’m holding off on that for now, but I don’t know if the sometimes nappies sometimes not is confusing him. But equally we can’t really leave the house yet!
Thanks in advance for any thoughts.

OP posts:
Are your children’s vaccines up to date?
Ygfrhj · 19/07/2025 11:52

Have you tried just not using pants? We had our DD in loose trousers or PJ bottoms for ages before we tried putting her in pants.

MissPeachyKeen · 19/07/2025 11:54

Pull ups might help him make the connection between needing to pull underwear down to use the potty given that he doesn't like nappies.

Maraudingmarauders · 19/07/2025 13:27

MissPeachyKeen · 19/07/2025 11:54

Pull ups might help him make the connection between needing to pull underwear down to use the potty given that he doesn't like nappies.

Sorry I should have specified he’s in pull ups, I just call them nappies generically.

@Ygfrhj i hadn’t thought of skipping the pants! Thanks we may give that a try and might feel less safe and secure than pants.

OP posts:
foreverchangingnappies · 21/08/2025 14:46

@Maraudingmaraudersdid it get better?

Im day 4 and my son 28 months is totally accident free when naked, but having loose shorts on him he keeps wetting through them! No pants currently

New posts on this thread. Refresh page