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She was hiding behind the couch when my mom found her, mid-accident, and walked her the rest of the way to the bathroom.
That’s how I’ll remember potty training a grandchild — my mom on one side, me on the other, my daughter at home resting because she was pregnant, working, and sick most mornings and needed a break she wasn’t going to ask for herself. So I asked for her. I told her I’d take it.
Why I stepped in
My daughter had her hands full. Working, pregnant with her second, tired in that specific way pregnancy makes you tired, sick more mornings than not. Potty training a grandchild takes a kind of patience that’s hard to find when you’re the one running on fumes, so I offered to take it on for the two weeks my granddaughter was staying with us. My mom was there too, and having her made the whole thing easier — we could trade off, one of us walking my granddaughter to the bathroom while the other had five minutes to sit down.
Watching my mom with her, I saw a patience in her I hadn’t seen up close in years. That surprised me more than anything about the potty training itself.
What we actually did
We’d tried a few months before this visit and it hadn’t taken. She wasn’t ready. Pediatricians talk about readiness signs like being able to walk to the potty on her own and staying dry for a couple hours at a stretch, and looking back, she just didn’t have those yet. I’ve also read that today’s diapers and pull-ups are more absorbent than what we used raising our own kids, which may be part of why kids don’t feel the wet the way we did and don’t connect the dots as fast. Whatever the reason, this time was different. She was ready, and we knew it inside a week.
We set a timer on Google for fifteen minutes and took her to the potty chair every time it went off, starting first thing in the morning and running all day. Night training wasn’t part of this — we kept her in a diaper at bedtime and left that battle for another day. If she went during the day, she got a chocolate chip. By the end of the first week, my granddaughter was telling Google to set the timer herself.
We used training panties, not pull-ups. I wanted her to feel it when she had an accident — that was the whole point. We started with a potty chair that sat right on the floor, and after about two weeks moved her up to a seat that fit on the regular toilet, with steps so she could climb up on her own.
She was excited those first few days. Then she wasn’t. The resistance wasn’t about the potty itself — it was her not wanting to stop what she was doing to go. A couple of times we just had to pick her up mid-play and carry her in. We tried bringing things along to soften the interruption — a toy, a balloon, bubbles — anything to make the walk to the bathroom feel like less of a loss.
That’s when the couch happened, too — she went in her pants and hid rather than stop and tell us. My mom found her back there and got her into the bathroom to finish. No scolding, just get her there and clean her up and try again next time — that’s what pediatricians recommend too, treating an accident as nothing to be punished, only fixed.
The reward is what carried her through that stretch. I knew it was working the day she started asking for the chocolate chip before we even offered it. It took about a week from start to finish.
Training on the road
We didn’t stop living life those two weeks, so training had to travel with us. I bought a portable potty chair and kept it in the truck. At the park, she’d stop playing, go, and go right back to what she was doing — she was more than willing once she knew it wouldn’t cost her the fun. Same at the store. We even drove ten hours back to her house partway through, potty chair set up in the truck the whole way, stopping when she needed to.
What I’d tell another grandmother about potty training a grandchild
Make suggestions. Don’t insist on doing it your way.
My daughter had her own ideas about how this should go, and I had mine, twenty-some years old and half-remembered — that’s the whole trick to potty training a grandchild without stepping on toes. I don’t recall the details of potty training my own two the way I remember this — I know they were both trained around two and a half, I know we used pull-ups, and that’s about all that stuck. What stuck this time is the timer, the M&Ms, the couch, my mom’s face when she found her back there.
What happened after she went home
When my daughter picked her up, she didn’t know how she could ever have thanked us enough for the work that had gone into it. My granddaughter kept it going once she was back — daycare, home, hardly any accidents. She moved to the toilet-top seat with steps without a fight. Six weeks after we started, she was in big girl panties. No training pants, no pull-ups, nothing.
What this really was
I told myself I was helping my daughter get some rest. That part’s true. But two weeks in, walking a two-year-old to the bathroom every fifteen minutes alongside my own mother, I understood it was something else too — time with her I wasn’t going to get any other way, not at this age, not for either of us.
My mom still has the patience.