Three days. That was what Camille’s Instagram feed kept promising about potty training: three days without nappies, three days at home, regular trips to the potty and a few accidents along the way.
So she cleared the weekend. No outings planned, just her, her almost-three-year-old, several spare pairs of trousers and a potty in the middle of the living room.
The first morning, there was one wee in the potty. Then another on the rug and a third a few centimetres away from the potty. Camille told herself this was normal.
On day two, her son already wanted nothing to do with the potty. By day three, he protested every time she mentioned it.
On the fourth morning, Camille looked at the potty with a slightly absurd thought: they had gone past three days. So something must have gone wrong.
When the three-day method turns into a promise
The problem was not necessarily the method. It may work brilliantly for some children.
The problem is what can happen in our heads when advice comes with a precise deadline. Three days for potty training, a few nights to improve sleep, one sentence to prevent a meltdown. An idea to try can quickly become an expected result.
And when that result does not appear, we look for what we did wrong. Did we start too early? Were we not consistent enough? Did we suggest the potty too often? Not often enough?
Camille could have carried on, hoping day four or five would finally unlock things. But mostly, both of them were beginning to hate the whole potty business.
So she put a nappy back on him. Not as a failure. More as a pause.
What if it is not working?
If a method is turning every trip to the toilet into a struggle, perhaps we can stop trying to “succeed” at it for a few days.
“We’re going to take a break from the potty. We’ll try again another time.”
Leave the potty available without constantly suggesting it.
Try again later without treating the previous days as wasted time.
That does not mean giving up at the first refusal, or that there is a perfect moment we are guaranteed to spot. It simply means a timetable can help organise an attempt, but it cannot tell us how long a particular child will need to learn.
Methods can give us ideas. They become much lighter when we treat them as experiments rather than promises.
We try, observe, adjust and sometimes stop.
Because there is not always a bug to fix.
Sometimes there is simply a child who did not read the tutorial.
