A book can help with
For the potty standoff, and the accidents nobody planned for.
Toilet training is one of those things every family gets through and almost nobody enjoys. It rarely runs to schedule, it goes backwards as often as forwards, and the more it becomes a battle of wills the longer it tends to take.
Books genuinely help here, more than you might expect. A small child likes seeing a character do the thing first, and reading about a potty makes it ordinary and slightly funny rather than strange and a bit alarming. Keep a few by the potty itself and let them look at them while they sit.
Here’s what I’d reach for. Find your child’s age and start there.
Getting the idea
This is entirely a toddler subject. These make the whole business familiar, cheerful and unembarrassing.
A baby considers the enormous question of whether to use the potty, with the outcome held back until the last page. It’s very funny and pitched perfectly at the very young, and children demand it repeatedly. Probably the best first potty book there is.
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The Little Princess decides nappies are for babies and takes to the potty, with plenty of accidents and false starts along the way. Being honest about the mishaps is what makes it useful, since a child sees that going wrong is part of it. Irreverent and funny.
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A matter-of-fact tour of the fact that every animal, and every person, does this, so there’s nothing odd or shameful about it. For a child who has become anxious or secretive about it, that normalising is exactly what’s needed. Direct, funny and much loved worldwide.
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The last bit of the way
Daytime is usually sorted by now and night-time often is not, which can leave a child feeling they have gone backwards. What follows covers the night-time side of it and the other sort of accident too, and holds to the line that the body gets there in its own time.
Little Bunny is dry all day and keeps waking up wet, and gets thoroughly fed up with himself about it. His parents stay calm through months of it, and his dad admits he was the same at that age, which is usually the line that lands. There is a short note for parents at the front with the plain facts about how common this is.
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Sammy cannot hold the water in his trunk however hard he tries, and a patient camel helps him find his own way of managing it. It came out of clinical practice and it shows in the best sense, in that nobody is told off and the child is the one who works it out. Written for children still wetting the bed past the age they had expected to stop.
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Soiling rather than wetting, which almost nothing else covers. Andrew stops using the toilet when his grandfather goes into hospital, and gets help from a doctor and a therapist. From Magination Press, with a note at the back explaining what encopresis is and what causes it. The grandfather’s illness runs through it, so it is not a light read, but it is the one that says out loud that this happens to other children.
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Still wet at night
This is a different thing from toilet training, and it is far commoner than a child believes: bedwetting affects about one seven year old in fifteen. By this age the trouble is rarely the wet sheets. It is the sleepover they turn down and the secret they are keeping.
Written for the child rather than for you, by a consultant community paediatrician who has trained continence nurses and school nurses for years. It explains the actual reasons a body does this, none of which are the child’s fault, and goes through what treatment involves. Sold by ERIC, the children’s bowel and bladder charity, which is the best recommendation it could have.
or on Bookshop.org
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Something to do together
A simple sticker chart for the potty, with room for the accidents too, since they’re part of it. I’m making it now, and it will live here soon.
Health visitors and paediatric guidance broadly agree that children manage this when they’re physically and emotionally ready, which varies a great deal, and that pressure tends to slow the whole thing down. Accidents and going backwards are normal, particularly around any other upheaval at home.
So follow their lead rather than a timetable, stay unbothered about accidents, and keep the whole business light. If your child is holding on painfully, becoming distressed, or things stall for a long stretch, your doctor or health visitor can help.
If your child is older and still wet at night, that is a different conversation and a much lonelier one. It is more common than they think: roughly one seven year old in fifteen, and around one teenager in seventy-five. It runs in families and it is nobody’s fault. You do not have to wait for them to grow out of it either, since treatment is available from the age of five under the NICE guidelines, so it is worth asking your GP or the school nurse. ERIC, the children’s bowel and bladder charity, is the place I’d point you, and they have advice for children as well as for parents.
These pages are written for the grown-ups looking after a child: parents, teachers and carers. A good book can sit beside a worried child, though it never stands in for a real conversation, or for proper support when something feels too big to carry alone.