Parenting: Key to success in potty training – a watch.

Today, I’m taking a break from my usual talk of technology and the like, in favor of a parenting moment.  Hopefully some of you find it helpful.

For quite some time now, we faced an uphill battle to get our son potty trained.  Now that he’s over 4 years old, it was time and really needed to happen. Alex is a highly focused child, who sometimes gets so immersed in what he’s doing that he doesn’t stop what he’s doing to use the potty.  He’s physically capable of taking care of business, so it’s obviously a behavioral thing.

My wife first found this potty watch at One Step Ahead. Great concept, terrible implementation. You set an interval for how often the child is to be reminded to use the potty (30, 60 or 90 minutes).  When the interval comes up, the child hears a little song, reminding the child to head for the potty.  Unfortunately, it’s a piece of garbage.  Our first one lasted about 3 weeks before the batteries died.  Opening the watch to replace the battery, followed by careful reassembly resulted in a watch that just didn’t work.  We called them of course, to complain about the poor quality of the watch, and to their credit, they did replace the watch at no charge.  The second watch just stopped making music after about 3 weeks.  See a pattern here?

Our final solution has thus far proven to be much better.  My wife found a women’s Timex lap watch that was small enough for Alex’s wrist.  The cool thing about this watch?  The timer feature.  It’s essentially a countdown clock that can be set to automatically restart at the end of each interval.  You can set the interval for whatever you like, no limits like the 30/60/90 of the old potty watch.

Alex gets to wear a real watch, which is also bound to help us with teaching him to tell time, he’s getting a prompt to remind him to hit the bathroom, which is sure helping reduce the number of accidents he’s been having, and we’re all happier.  So far, so good.