Q&A: making the leap to underpants

Erin writes:

"P is now almost 29 months old and has shown an interest in the potty since he was 17 months old.  We bought him one at 18 months, he used it a couple of times a week, but we never pushed it and he never really got all that interested in it. 

Now that I'm a SAHM and he's not in daycare anymore, I decided it was time to be serious about potty-training so that he'll be fully trained by the time he goes back to school in a few months. I decided to go for the diaperless-thing in the house...no bottoms at all.  He's a pro!  I don't even have to remind him to go potty.  He only had one accident on the first day, and he was already in the bathroom, trying to get to his potty when that one happened.

It's been a week, and he's great.  The problem is whenever we put anything ON his bottom, he loses it entirely.  We tried Gerber underpants.  Pees through 5 pairs or more a day, and doesn't seem to care--just lets us know that he's wet and needs to be cleaned off.  We tried shorts alone, thinking that since they were only tight at the waistband, that would make a difference.  Nope.

We're at a loss of what to do now, and I'm feeling house-bound!  I don't want to put diapers on him when we go out, but I tried the underpants the other day and he peed all over himself while in his carseat--and I'd prefer not to have to wash it daily.  We have a portable potty seat and he'll sit on it when we're out if I remind him, but he's never once gone potty when we're not at home.  Help!"

It sounds like you're doing really well on the potty training front. It's just going to take a little time and a few nudges to get him full-time in regular underpants.

The first thing I'd do is go cold turkey on the pull-ups. When he's in diapers (I'm assuming he's still in diapers at night) he's in diapers, and when he's not he's in cloth underpants. Now before you freak out, let me recommend two kinds of cloth underpants. The first is the Gerber training pants (I've seen them at both KMart and Target, and I'm assuming your local baby store will have them, and a quick Googling shows that they're available at PottyTrainingConcepts.com ) or Luvable Friends training pants. These are regular cloth underpants, but they have a triple layer down the middle, so if your child has an accident the underpants will get wet but the clothes (and floor) won't. You'll need a bunch of these.

These are going to be your bread-and-butter, getting-used-to-staying-dry-even-while-wearing-underpants underpants. You can try them on him for short periods in the house to get him used to feeling when he has to go even while wearing pants. You can also try them for short walking trips outside the house. Have him try to go before you leave, then put on the pants and go walk around outside, then come back in and have him use the potty again. Start with a 5-minute trip, then increase the time a little each trip. Eventually he can wear them for long periods in the house and long periods outside the house.

The other kind of cloth underpants is the kind with nylon or PUL (laminated fabric) on the outside (basically a washable pull-up). You can find them at many big-box retailers, and also here and here and here (and a bunch of other places, too). You'll need a few of these.

These are the pants you'll put on him for naps or when you go out in the car or in public. They're still underpants, so you're not backsliding into diapers or in the endless pull-up limbo, but you won't end up with a soggy crib or carseat.

Once you've got the proper equipment to keep him moving forward, it's just a waiting game. He'll get better and better at knowing when he has to go, and being able to feel things even when he's wearing pants. Eventually he'll be able to stay dry without thinking about it. And even once he's reliably dry all day, he'll still have occasional accidents (especially if he's particularly stressed or excited, or is concentrating really hard on something).

It sounds like you've got the right momentum, and one of these days it'll "catch" for him and he'll be in underpants full-time. Congratulations on being the mom of a big boy!

Comments

[Tabetha]

It may help to praise him for being such a big boy and point out that he gets to wear big boy underwear like Daddy (or any other male figure he might want to imitate).If that does not work, you may have to withstand the wet undies for a while. Both of the two I have trained have regressed slightly and started wetting again after being completely trained. Don't give up. It just takes a little patience.

[Jody]

So my kids are five and all, and still wearing diapers at night. That's more or less okay with me, because whatever, and besides, Wilder still pees through those Gerber padded underpants a few times a day. (Well, leaks through would be a better way of putting it. He just doesn't want to go to the potty until it's Too Late. Distractable, that kid is.)

But, do you think those rubber-lined training pants would work when we switched to night training? Because I think the kids are waking up, or half-waking, peeing, and then coming into our bed for the rest of the night, but chalking it all up to nightmares. I see NO sign that they're staying dry all night, in other words. And I'm wondering: would a few nights of wetness help? Or are they just on the low end of the curve?

I should add, I don't care that they're in our bed, it doesn't happen every day, it happens around 4am when it does happen (hence my gut that it's a combo of dreams and bladder), they're not leaking through the diapers, I'm just feeling like, could I push this curve or not? And, although it's true that my step-mom may raise her eyebrows in July, she won't do it to my face, and there are neighbor kids who only got out of nighttime diapers very recently, so I'm not really caring about the outside pressures when it comes to this particular milestone.

Although I do wonder: how did I night-train by 27 months, while we're motoring along in diapers at 63 months? It's a mystery.

Eh. I'm guessing I can't push the curve (it's been my experience that I almost never can), but I'm thinking out loud here. Once again, I'm having trouble with the idea that many developments in our house are not trending-upward curves but rather sudden explosions. From soaking nighttime diapers to dryness, with no warning in between, is probably our collective destiny.

Still. Would the rubber pants maybe help send a signal that, right now, isn't getting through?

[Ellie]

We had a lot of luck with our little boy by going from naked to very loose pants, with no underpants. The underpants just seemed to trigger an, "oh, I have something to pee in" response. But when he had the loose pants on (large size shorts, we did this in the summer) it seemed help the transition. After a week we put him in very loose underpants---the tighter ones still seemed to remind him of diapers.

Still no luck on staying dry at naps or nights, however, and the Poop in the Potty argument continues. A step at a time, though, right?

[Linda]

How cool. I didn't know there was an alternative to the plain underwear vs pullup debate. Thanks!

[lb]

I have been in that very spot. What I did was make the underpants thing into a different issue from peeing in the potty. So I would put underpants on him, and then check them after twenty minutes, and then I would be all "OH WOW! DRY UNDERPANTS!" and we would do high five and dance around and sometime stick a sticker on the lovely dry underpants - that kind of thing. You could use whatever reward works for your kid.

It really helped. I gradually increased the time between checking until I was really just exclaiming over them when he went potty. Within a few days, I was able to leave him in underpants and not have any more accidents than if he had been naked.

Good luck - I know the naked thing can get a bit old after a while.

[Moxie]

15 years ago I wouldn't have imagined that I'd be agreeing with the statement "the naked thing can get a bit old after a while." Sigh.

Jody, I think you may be right. My paternal grandfather used to admonish my mother sternly that she shouldn't let us kids ever play with fire because we'd dream we were trying to put out the fire and wet the bed. So maybe your kids are having combined peeing and nightmares.

We night trained by forgetting to buy diapers. One night at bedtime we discovered that we had no diapers, but we had a waterproof pad for the bed. So we night-trained. He wet the bed two out of the first three nights, then gradually got to the point at which he would wet the bed maybe once a week. We'd hear him pad pad pad into our room and climb into bed with us, adn in the morning we'd see that he was wearing different pajama bottoms than he'd gone to bed in. It turned out that he'd wet the bed, woken up and changed his pajama bottoms, then come into bed with us.

I think you could get the waterproof training pants and try it, or just go with only pajamas and see what happens for a week. You'll have a bunch more laundry for the first few nights, but I don't think a kid wearing a diaper has any incentive to have a dry night, so you could be waiting forever for your kids to go dry all night in diapers. It's worth a try.