For those who are new to the blog, my daughter Cydney has been able to “Hold it” since July last year. We’ve been going through the song amd dance of potty training for the last eight months but she’s been over it since day two.
Recently, I’ve been trying different approaches to this whole potty thing. First thing in the morning we try, she gets up right away. Once an hour “Cydney, you gotta use the potty?”
“No.”
After meals, random times of day, around the time of day she number two’s? It doesn’t matter. After a couple of minutes she’s ready to get up. She also gets upset and begins to get upset. I try.
Well, I’ve been trying the wearing no diapers approach. They say especially little girls don’t like the feeling on their leg when going number one. One or two times it’d happened accidentally and she would get q little upset so I figured there is some validity to it. Yes, its true. Being the clever little girl that Cydney is, she found a way around this and still not using the potty. One morning last week after a potty attempt Cydney was walking around with no diaper on and she had to go. She didn’t tell me, she simply sat on MY leg and peed on me. Oh joy.
I was talking to my friend about it who had gone through the potty struggle with their daughter. Their daughter is now three and well trained. However, from time to time she would still go on herself in public, at the park, or in the car. I asked if that was out of a need for attention. They said it was and said this “The two things a child has control over is when they eat and when they pee.” It made sense. While I’d never looked at it that way they were dead on.
Being that half of my tenure in college and my bachelors degree is in psychology I tend to analyze everything and look at things from such an approach. I thought about Sigmund Freud’s theory on psychosexual development stages and how this stage is the big oral/anal fixation stage. By this theory, I would be classified as someone with an oral fixation and I recognize that my daughter is not that way. Freud made great points although his theories are scientifically sound because they cannot be proven or discredited. But they make too much sense that it is still used and regarded because of so. While it may or may not be true it is applicable to us all when training one to use the potty. Cydney would definitely be considered anal because she likes to clean up and does have an obsession with the potty. While it is a hassle and expensive, I try to facilitate her process as much as humanly possible based on her own time. She’ll get it when she’s ready. All I can do is try, hope its sooner than later, and try not to shame her into the next stage.
Single Dadventures 