Reward Charts Mummy Daddy

Reward Charts for Mum and Dad?

Here’s a new concept for you…

So, we had been trying to potty train our daughter for some time, with varying degrees of success. Sometimes it felt like you were winning the battle and that nappies would be a thing of the past, and other day, well it felt like you were stepping back in time and that things were actually worse than before you started.

We had tried lots of different techniques.

“Predicting” when she would need to go, and then constantly be asking the question every five minutes in the hope that she would say she needed the toilet. Sometimes this worked, but mainly it seemed to be coincidence – of course, from the amount we were pestering her, one of the times would be the right time.

Positive encouragement, lots of Yay! And Hurrahs! Clapping of hands, singing songs. It seemed to put a smile on her face and offer a little bit of encouragement, but didn’t seem to help her understand when her bladder was full.

Hard line, no nappies, lets go commando and deal with the accidents as they happen. So a day was set aside, mop and bucket at the ready. At first, this was a nightmare, but after a few hours, things seemed to start to sink in and we really felt we were making progress with this. However, it was time consuming, it meant we couldn’t really do much and were restricted to the laminate flooring. If we had had more sunny days and nice weather, and maybe a long weekend, I think we would have continued with this further, but unfortunately, we couldn’t dedicate ourselves to potty training 24/7

Reward charts – of course we tried reward charts. We’ve had some great successes with reward charts before. We followed our normal routine with them, and they helped a great deal. We would have good days and bad days still, and some times her mind wasn’t really on it. Then one day, came a question out of the blue, and radically changed our approach….

“Why don’t mummy and daddy have a reward chart for every time you need the toilet?”

What a great question! Here we are trying to tell our daughter that what she has been used to for the past 2 years of growing up is no longer to right way to behave. In general, she’s never with us when we need to go, so how would she distinguish between what “babies” do and what “big girls” do.

So that was it, mummy and daddy now had their very own reward charts to go alongside hers. Every time we needed to go, we would make it clear to her, and go through the routine, flush the toilet, wash our hands, then ask her to give us one of our stickers. Once we had a full chart, we got our reward! Our daughter can be quite competitive and she always wanted to be the winner and fill up her chart first. This really encouraged her. Of course, sometimes she would fake going, just so she could get a sticker. There was a certain amount of judgement we had to apply to this technique, thrilled with her motivation, we didn’t want her to get away with it, but also, did not want to discourage her.

A few weeks later, we had a fully potty trained daughter. The odd accident still occurs and bed wetting will take a little bit longer to resolve – but we feel we cracked it.

But we didn’t stop there….

We decided that if reward charts were going to be part of our culture, then we should all have them. Mummy and Daddy now have their own charts with their own tasks (the stuff we do anyway) ensuring that we brush our teeth, do the ironing, clean our rooms and have our baths.