From Paul:
A family friend’s son resisted potty training, so she put a ping-pong ball in the toilet bowl and had him aim at it. Aiming at the ball helped the little fella keep his concentration. Neat hey?
Tags: Parenting, Potty training
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About Asha Dornfest
Asha Dornfest is a writer, parent, and insistent optimist living in Portland, Oregon. She is the author of PARENT HACKS, co-author of MINIMALIST PARENTING, and co-host of the Edit Your Life podcast.
I’ve heard of using cheerios for the same thing and then you don’t have to fish a urine-covered ball out of the toilet – you just flush ’em.
Yeah … What Christy wrote is immediately what I thought … all well and good until someone has to fish that sucker out. Cheerio’s seem better.
+1 for Cheerios
Also the paper dots from the hole punch (if anyone uses a hole punch anymore…). Just two or three, don’t want to empty the whole thing in there. (You can buy floating targets, as well, more ‘flushable’ material. Or do what one urinal company did – put a waterproof decal/image of a fly on the bottom of the urinal – apparently it improves the aim when there’s something to aim at, even for adults! LOL!)
Hooray for collective wisdom!
Aforementioned Paul here. Yip, cheerio is much better, so mission accomplished for Hacks! đŸ˜‰
A square of toilet paper maybe “old school” but the effect is the same and the supply is always present. If you call it a “ship”, and follow that with “sink the ship”, I believe you’ll find that accuracy is dramatically improved, the mess is minimal and the satisfaction of a “sunken ship” keeps the little guy coming back again and again. Its not as elaborate as the other methods but its work for 3 generations of boys in my family.
Fruit Loops are more fun because they’re so colorful and, as mentioned, you don’t have to fish them out.
For a more realistic game of fireman, a flaming piece of paper always does the trick. Just be sure to have a fire extiguisher handy.
(I keed, I keed…)
I heard that the Dutch actually put a picture of a fly on every urinal in mens toilets. It seems it does give us something to aim for!
If you are looking for more hints and tips on how to potty train your toddler you could do worse than check out this site: –
http://pottytrainingmethod.blogspot.com
Good Luck!
How about this quotation from Thoreau for this political age we live in “The effect of a good government is to make life more valuable; of a bad one, to make it less valuable. ”