Smell My Butt

“Get away from me! You stink,” the eleven-year-old boy yells at his three-year-old brother.

“Smell my butt. Smell my butt. Smell my butt,” the three-year-old screams while chasing his big brother.

“Mom, change him!” demands the older boy, who is now considered by the school district to be gifted and talented but did not use the toilet successfully until he was four years and three months old.

“Are you poopy?” the mother asks the younger boy.

“Yes.”

“Are you going to use the potty today?”

“No.”

“Big boys use the potty. Are you going to use the potty?”

“Let me think about it,”

Silence.

“Still no.”

“Well, we are going to try today and you can get a treat for just trying.”

“Don’t care.”

“We’ll see about that. You’re all clean. Go play.”

“Now do you want to smell my butt?”

Stop Obsessing: Your Child Will Learn To Use the Potty

The Dewey Decimal number for potty training is 649.62. I know this because there isn’t a day that goes by at the library when I am not approached by a spastic parent convinced that their children will still be peeing in their pants in college (probably, but that will be more likely caused by binge drinking and Greek life rituals than never acquiring bladder control skills).

Let me assure you that your child will indeed learn to both pee and poop in the potty. And, you probably don’t need all those play by play instruction manuals, written by child psychologists, pediatricians, behavioral therapists and stay-at-home moms, who are looking for away to prey upon other moms’ insecurities to make a quick buck from home with kids in tow.

No matter if you use the “Potty Training in a Day” method, the "Naked Baby" technique of allowing your child to pee and poo on your floor for a few days, the “Infant Method” of randomly holding babies who can’t even sit up on their own over a toilet until you learn their body rhythms, or embrace the logic of “introduce the potty, and they will go when they are ready,” the results will be the same – a potty proficient child. (By the way, just because your kids ditch the diapers before age two doesn't mean they are any smarter than those who wait till a few months before kindergarten to use the potty).

So stop obsessing, stop driving you and child nuts with constant potty practice, stop boring all your friends with poo-poo stories, talk about something else at your playgroups, check-out a book at the library that you really want to read.

However, there is one downside to letting your potty training obsession go: You’ll have to find a new Facebook status update.