Five minutes after putting his diaper on him. My almost two year old, Arthur, pulled off his diaper and strutted around our living room with his bare-naked bottom. I picked up his diaper and tried to coax him into letting me put the diaper back on him.
“No paiper!” he insisted. After having potty-trained four other kids, I realized that Arthur was ready for toilet training. However, for many first time parents, understanding when a child is ready for potty training and knowing how to toilet train a child can be a challenge.
As a new parent, I remember fretting when my oldest child wasn’t out of diapers yet by the time she was 2 1/2. My doctor had told me that different children would show readiness signs at different ages and that it would take longer for certain children to potty train than others. He also instructed that I not rush the potty training as starting it too early for some kids would cause problems (e.g. bed wetting) later. However, no one told me that potty training would take lots of time and persistence. In addition, I failed to recognize the clues my daughter was giving me to tell me that she was ready to be toilet trained.
With my other children, I began to understand that when a child starts to take his/her diaper off after wetting or soiling the diaper, he/she is probably ready for toilet training. There are still other signs though. For example, each time their older siblings went to the bathroom, my middle two boys, Wayne and Rayner, also insisted that I take off their diapers so that they too could use the toilet.
Knowing when to start potty training is just half the battle though. Knowing how to do it and being persistent, consistent, and patient with it is the bigger part of the potty wars. I realized after my second or third child that potty training becomes easier for a child if the child begins to recognize that “tinkling” or “I-have-to-go” sensation. The hard part is getting the child to recognize it and to control it enough to go in the toilet instead of in his/her diaper (or on the floor during times when a diaper just isn’t handy).
What I would often do is to try to also make potty training fun and encouraging. I would pick a day that I knew I would be free and plan a “Potty Party.” Treats for the day would of course be anything that would cause the child to pee a lot (e.g. popsicles, kool-aid, even clear soda). Every hour or so, I would take the child to sit on the toilet, and each time the child successfully goes in the toilet, I would praise him/her. Each successful toilet session also resulted in a potty treat (mine mostly got popsicles).
Experience has also taught me that to train a child to go without a diaper, you must take away the diaper altogether. What do I mean? Well somehow with all of my kids, it seemed that they had a harder time picking up that “tinkling” sensation if I left their diapers on or if I just gave them a Pull-up. What I would do during Potty Training 101 then, was to give them a cloth or plastic underwear to wear. I don’t know whether my kids were just used to the feel of a wet or dirty diaper (even though I really don’t let them sit in them), but each time they went in the cloth or plastic diaper, it seemed as if they could more easily understand that their underwear was dirty and demanded to use the toilet before they had to go or have their underwear taken off if they had already gone in it. After a day or so of scheduled potty sit-ons and being in an underwear, most of my kids began to pick up on when they had to go, and of course, the rest is history 
Nice information, thanks for the post.
Hello, I have browsed most of your posts. This post iswhere I got the most useful information for my information gathering. Thanks for posting, maybe we can see more on this. I also like this layout can you tell me where to get it
You have a fantastic method of placing issues into perspective.