What Does Being “Potty Trained” Actually Mean?

Ask five people, and expect to hear five answers.

If you ask me, however, here is what I will tell you, per the Oh Crap! principles as well as my lived experience as a mom of a potty trained son and part-time EC’d daugther.

• Your child can recognize the sensation of having the urge to pee or poop and can hold it in until he or she reaches a toilet.

• Early on in the potty training process, you can expect to do the majority of the prompting i.e. telling your child or physically guiding your child to the toilet. However, after a few weeks of wrapping up potty training, you can expect the vast majority of prompting to be led by your child as opposed to your child waiting for you to initiate. Typically, self-initiation of going to the toilet when the urge hits takes anywhere from 3-8 weeks. The caveat is, we mothers should always expect to prompt our children even into the teen years at certain times. For example, if you’re about to head in the car, you’ll likely remind the household to use the bathroom one final time before you hit the road. Don’t expect your potty trained three-year-old to have the foresight and critical thinking skills to take herself to the toilet because you announced you’re about to get in the car.

The above two criteria may seem pretty obvious. Duh; of course the self-awareness of feeling the urge to go and then taking yourself encapsulates being potty trained in tandem with the child taking the initiative instead of being fully reliant on the parent to read cues 24/7.

But, did you know that pee consolidation is also a key market of truly being potty trained? A child cannot be considered fully potty trained until he or she can demonstrate that he or she can consolidate pee. If the Oh Crap! potty training blocks are achieved adequately and chronologically, then pee consolidation occurs naturally. However, if at any point another potty training method was used or the blocks were achieved impartially, out-of-order, or a step in the process was rushed, then it is possible that improper potty training occured.

If this is the case, please do not feel down. I’m a firm believer that any blip in the potty training process can be remedied, and in fact, I have seen this happen.

So, why is the ability to consolidate pee necessary in order to be potty trained? Because dribbles, or frequent tiny pees that occur in quarter-sized quantities every 15 or so minutes, are reflective of a child who has not yet mastered the bodily awareness and control to not just recognize the urge, but more importantly hold a normal amount of pee in long enough in order to make it successfully to the toilet and then release effortlessly upon sitting on the toilet.

Not consolidating pee is a sign that your child is still in Block One of potty training.

Dribbling very early on in potty training is to be expected and typically resolves itself, however if you are well into potty training and witnessing consistent dribbles without signs of pee consolidation, please book a consult so we can remedy this.

Moving onto other nuances behind the definition of “potty trained,” nowadays parents will often specify whether their child is day, night, or nap trained. It’s most common for parents to want to tackle being daytime trained first, and then nap and finally night. Or, you’ll see day and nap tackled together and then night. This is a new-ish phenomenon that boomed after the ubiquity and convenience of nighttime pull-ups in sizes spanning to old kids. Parents have a tendency to want to push night training to the backburner for as long as humanly possible out of fear of disrupting sleep and doing a lot of laundry.

So, you are of course free to specify whether you mean day, nap, or night trained. This is a very personal decision. However, the best practice is to either potty train for all times of day all at once, or tackle day first and then nap and night together. Nap and night will go hand-in-hand if you choose to separate them from daytime.

For simplicity sake though, let’s just talk about day trained. Wearing the diaper or pull-up as a backup is not potty trained. The idea is not to treat the diaper or pull-up like really absorbent underwear “just in case.” If your child is potty trained and even if— especially if— you have actively committed right now to the potty training process, then your child should not be in a diaper or pull-up period. Not during outings, not at school, not anytime during the day.

Still unsure how to accomplish this? Let’s meet! I’ll show you the way.