How to teach a child to potty: ways and practical tips for teaching a baby to hygiene
Each family has its own methods of potty training a child; the older generation willingly shares their experience with young parents. But are other people's advice always effective?
Usually a child cannot refuse diapers due to the overly creative approach of the parents. For example, instead of the usual adults buy a music pot. The kid, who honestly completed the task assigned to him, suddenly begins to hear bravura music and gets scared. You will never seat him on this musical instrument again.
How to potty train a child correctly, without punishment and without injuring the baby's psyche?
How to potty train a child without punishment
If there are many people in the family, and the room is small, small children often need a closed space to master the basic hygiene skills so that no one distracts them from this delicate matter. The kid is just learning to control his sphincters, and this process does not tolerate fuss.
A good tip on how to potty train a child is as follows: put the pot in a secluded corner so that the baby can calmly complete the task, away from prying eyes, without being distracted by external stimuli.
If the child steadfastly refuses to sit on the potty, you can buy a toilet seat and offer him to do everything “like an adult".
If the baby has nocturnal enuresis, the main thing is not to punish him and do not discuss this problem in front of him with all the guests.
Punishment for this event changes the child's self-esteem and affects his psyche in the future. Punishment may not necessarily be related to swearing. For example, an adult woman recalls how her parents, a four-year-old, forced herself to hang the mattress to dry. The whole yard understood what had happened, and they made fun of the child from young to old. In the future, this injury required special treatment.
Practical tips for potty training your child:
- Do not draw the attention of the child to the fact of enuresis and, of course, do not punish for it.
- If the child goes to bed early and sleeps for a long time, wake him up in the first half of the night and put him on the potty.
Features of potty training
Whatever way you choose to potty train your child, do not forget about the physiological characteristics of the baby. Keep in mind that at this age the regulation of sphincters is arbitrary, it is formed on average by one and a half years, but in some children this process occurs much later. It is worth asking grandmothers how this process happened with dad and mom when they were little. Very often the boy repeats the childhood situation of the father, and the girl – the mother. However, it is possible that you put your baby to bed too early, for example at eight in the evening, and he sleeps until eight in the morning.
Parents put the child to bed early if they cannot send him to sleep during the day. An important antidiuretic hormone is responsible for reducing urine output at night in humans. It controls the excretion and accumulation of urine. However, its action begins later than 8 pm, and therefore the child laid before this time is outside the zone of its action for the first part of the night. Then enuresis is possible.
In the first phase of sleep, the amount of urine is very large, and the child may not stand it. Then around ten in the evening you can raise the baby or just put on diapers for him.
The less emotional outbursts the child notices in connection with this, the more reliably the process will proceed. However, if potty training a child is too difficult and problems persist even after four years, you need to contact a specialist (primarily an endocrinologist and a neurologist).