nicki86

To Anonymous Struggling Mom – at this point it sounds like there’s too much pressure on it and she’s totally freaking out. I would take a week-long break from all things potty training. Don’t even mention it to her. Then next week start fresh. Most potty training methods don’t recommend underwear until they’re solidly potty trained because it feels too much like a diaper. If you’ve seen Emily’s survey results, the naked method had the highest success rate. When you start back up, pick a room and cover the floor in puppy pads, and bring the potty there. No underwear, no pants. That’s where she plays that day, and someone needs to be with her at all times. When she pees on the floor, you have to do your absolute best not to get mad or shame her. Just calmly say something like “we pee in the potty, not on the floor.” Not everyone likes rewards and I absolutely did not want to do rewards, but in the end, it was the only thing that worked for us. First my daughter got a reward (an m&m) just for sitting on the potty. When she was good with that, she had to do something on the potty to get a reward. When she was good with peeing in the potty, she only got rewards for pooping. She’s been potty trained since November and we phased out the rewards for pooping a long time ago but now she’s going through a phase where she “can’t” pull her pants up or down, so now she gets a reward for completing the entire process on her own.
As for the underwear, we kept her in loose shorts/pants without underwear for a couple of weeks until we felt like she really had it down and then started putting underwear on her. She did have a few more accidents when we started with underwear, but she got used to it quickly.

OP said that when it happens on purpose, the parents don’t correct it. Even if there are extenuating circumstances, if a child is consistently breaking another child’s toys, at a bare minimum the parents should be saying “uh oh, you broke that toy. Let’s try to be more careful next time.” And to the hosts, if there’s something else going on, the parents should say “kiddo is struggling with x right now. We’re working on it but he’s still having trouble. Sorry about the broken toy.” It sounds like they are saying absolutely nothing to their kid or the hosts, which is not okay.

This is my thought too. There’s also a lot of essentially “toddlers will be toddlers” but the toys are *only* getting broken by one particular toddler. If the kid doesn’t grow out of it, the parents aren’t going to one day say “well Suzie is 6 now so I guess we should start replacing the things she breaks.” They don’t respect you now and they aren’t going to later. I think it’s worth addressing it, but I think you should also be prepared for them to get defensive and the friendship to suffer and possibly end. But despite what other comments are saying, it won’t be ending over broken toys. It will be ending because they have no respect.