I cannot thank you enough for your advice and encouragement. We followed your suggestions and they worked like a dream. We have been diaper-free for 2 weeks now and I’m amazed at how well our daughter is doing. We still wake her for potty trips 3 times throughout the night, but she stays dry and she has even started independently running to the potty throughout the day or tells us when she needs to go.

The key suggestions that really helped were: explaining to our daughter that she didn’t need diapers or pull-ups anymore and packing them away together; using the timer combined with the neutral tone “it’s time to sit on the potty” (which we only did for the first day); waking her to pee every three hours throughout the night; and, explaining that it’s OK if she sits and nothing happens and that she can return to what she was doing right away afterwards.

We have had very few accidents and we are all so proud of her (including her being proud of herself)! We celebrated her second birthday on Friday and I am so proud to say that she is out of diapers. In retrospect… I’m not sure what we were thinking, as it seems so obvious now: panties during the day combined with diapers at night and pull-ups whilst out is just far too confusing!

Thank you again. I love reading your posts.
Melanie

Thanks for sharing your process for potty learning. Over the past two weeks, we have followed a very similar method for our 23 month old daughter. We had such success both home and away that I thought we had a fully potty trained little girl, until yesterday we were met with a drastic regression that has continued through to today. Now, we’ve had two full days of “accidents”, resistance to sitting on the potty at our suggestion, she hasn’t even been telling us when she has to go, in fact when she does have to pee, she begins saying, “no pee, no poo” in a panicked tone and even asks for a “fresh diaper.” I’m almost at my wits end, though I’m trying to remain encouraging. I’m not sure what went wrong and I’m only hoping that this is a natural regression. We don’t want to force her, nor do we want to make a big deal about it. She gets so worked up that I have resorted to putting a diaper on her when she has requested one. If you have any advice/insight to offer, we would greatly appreciate it! My husband and I are not sure what to do next.

Thanks so much.