I figured it out.

Several months ago I read Toilet Training in Less than a Day, by Nathan Azrin. Several of Ryan's sisters have used it and thought it was good, so I thought I'd see what it was all about.

The book does have a lot of interesting ideas. I read it and thought that it made a lot of sense. The idea is that you give the child lots to drink so that they can have a lot of opportunities to practice using the toilet, and you spend the entire day focusing on them learning to use the toilet. It's all very positive and focused on helping the child learn to do it all independently. I would say that his definition of toilet trained is probably a little different from most people's, though.

What really surprised me was his success rate. He developed his method while teaching mentally disabled people to independently use the toilet. These were people that were disabled enough that they had never been able to learn to use the toilet. Then he took what he learned and tried it on toddlers. With the toddlers, his success rate was nearly 100%. Almost all of them were potty trained in one morning, and all of them were potty trained after a couple of days. I couldn't figure out how he had such a great success rate, because I'm positive that it will never work for Kevin. He's bossy and doesn't like to be told what to do. Making Mom and Dad pleased with him isn't much of a motivation for him. He likes to do things himself, and figure things out himself. There are just a lot of aspects of his personality that won't work well with this method. Some of those characteristics will change as he develops, but a lot of them won't. I know there are a lot of kids who have personalities that would make this method difficult. Azrin's solution? You'll need to spend a couple of weeks teaching them not to be so stubborn. A couple of weeks? Ha!

So here is my theory for why he had such a high success rate. He screened all of the children to see if they were developmentally ready to be potty trained. The kids that were stubborn or resistant to following directions were not ready to be potty trained, and their parents were told to come back later. The kids never stopped being like that because that was their personality, and finally they just potty trained themselves or the parents figured something out, so they never ended up in Azrin's statistics. So Azrin got a biased sample. 100% of the children that were a good match for his method got potty trained using the Toilet Training in Less than a Day method.

Don't get me wrong. I do think there are some good ideas in the book. It makes sense to me to use underwear, not pull-ups, to potty train, because pull-ups feel just like diapers. It makes sense to put a lot of focus on it for a few days rather than just hounding the child with "Do you have to go potty? NOW do you have to go potty?" without teaching them about it. I like the idea of doing the practice runs after they have an accident. I think it makes sense to have the child help clean up after an accident (if it's just the wet kind) so that they learn to take responsibility for their own hygiene. And a lot of his ideas have actually been helpful in areas of parenting besides potty training. But I have a feeling that this probably won't be a one-day process for Kevin. The method might work well for Heidi, though.

Yes, we did make an attempt at potty training Kevin this week. I used some of Azrin's method, but not much. I hadn't realized how deep we are in the NO! phase. All of a sudden we're having to use a lot of reverse psychology. He's also been having a hard time getting to sleep for his naps, which has meant sleep deprivation and grumpiness. So I decided not to push it. We'll try again this summer. He'll probably be better at communicating anyway. And I also have a feeling that Kevin needs this to be his accomplishment. Occasionally he still asks to sit on the potty, and I think for now we'll leave it at that. I've been dreading this since Kevin was a few months old because I could already tell we were in for a rough ride with this kid.

 . . . But maybe he'll decide to surprise me for my birthday today and suddenly be completely potty trained with no effort on my part. : )