If an eighteen-month-old finishes training fast, he will continue to need help with clothing for quite some time, and may continue to have an occasional accident when his timing is off or he struggles with clothing. You must continue to supervise unless your bathroom has been thoroughly baby-proofed. Good baby-proofing will probably mean your child must use a potty chair instead of a potty seat so that the regular toilet can remain locked.

How Long?

How long a toddler will need in order to finish training depends on a number of factors, especially the frequency of the practice sessions and the child's maturity level, temperament, and motivation. Frequent practices can speed learning if the child is cooperative. Working parents might start on a weekend so they can hold potty practice every two hours during the first day or two. However, you should only hold one practice a day until your child willingly stays in the bathroom for five minutes and sits on the potty for a minute without a struggle. Drop back to having him practice once or twice a day on workdays if necessary, and hold more whenever possible.

Stress May Cause Setbacks

In truth, it is impossible to predict how long it will take for potty practice sessions to work their magic. Some children are still learning to remain seated and sit still long enough to have a chance to use the potty while others are completely trained. Even then, toddlers may have setbacks. During a particularly difficult period they may regress, have many accidents, or refuse to use the potty altogether, so that they must return to diapers or wear pull-ups for a time. The stress can be due to something in the child's environment — perhaps a change in daycare teachers or a divorce.

Stress can also be due to what is happening within the child. During that terribly-two-year-old stage when toddlers' desire to be grown up and in control collides with the reality of being young and helpless, potty refusals and accidents can become a real problem. Fortunately, retraining by putting the child back on a schedule of frequent practice sessions can be accomplished in short order once the child is back on an even keel. In the meantime, continue taking your child into the bathroom regularly even if he won't sit on the potty. Take a book for him to read and studiously ignore tantrums, but make sure he doesn't hurt himself by throwing himself about. Once he learns that he must remain in the bathroom until he's calmed down, his tantrums will subside. Soon after he's stopped struggling and remains calm, he'll be willing to sit on the potty for a bit. When he fully relaxes, he'll be able to use the potty if the timing of the practice sessions is right.

Trouble with the Next Step

A potential problem of this method is that some children get to the point of being virtually accident-free because they use the potty whenever their parent initiates a practice session at the right time, but they have trouble taking the next step: figuring out when they need to use the potty and going without a prompt. They can seem quite stuck for a while. If so, the motivational tricks and tactics described at the end of the chapter can help them complete training, as can the accident management strategies described in Chapter 8.