So we’ve been working on potty training for Piers lately. I never thought I’d talk this much about waste elimination in my life. Now when we potty trained his sister she picked it up pretty quickly. It didn’t take too long for here to get the idea of what we wanted her to do and she did her best. I remember being slightly frustrated by it but also that it was not too many weeks of working on it. Now Piers, on the other hand, likes to go to great lengths (it seems) to show us how different he is from Hope. People say boys are more difficult to potty train and based on a study of two toddlers, I can agree.

Like many things in parenting, we’ve found that you have to deal with the child’s specific concerns in a situation to give them the most help. Of course Piers can’t/won’t tell us why he doesn’t like potty training, so we try different things to get some positive responses. We started with positive reinforcement. By using the potty he gets some M&Ms. He liked that, but not enough to motivate him to use the potty, it was more just a bonus to him.

The local hardware store has a large display of small toys by the checkout stand. Because of this, Piers likes to go with me and when I have to run and pick something up. So we are there and he sees a little bucket truck that he really wanted. I told him the next time he used the potty, I’d get it for him. Well he wants to go right now! So we head home and sure enough, he makes a beeline for the potty. After much straining and grunting, a pea-sized lump appears in the potty and he is beaming with pride. We praise him and then head back to the hardware store to get the truck. I was elated, he understood that when used the potty we were happy and he was rewarded. We had turned a corner.

Well, not so much. He decided that getting a small toy was not much of a motivational tool. So Amy stepped it up a notch. She bought this large garbage truck that he had been wanting and placed it in the bathroom still in the box. If he had no accidents in three days, he’d get the truck. Eventually, he just gave up on the truck.

So rather than reward, we switched over to punishment. Each time he had an accident, he’d lose a toy until he told us he needed to use the potty. He certainly didn’t like this but again it did not motivate him enough to change his behavior. Now we have a stack of toys in the bathroom. He gets one back every so often, but again he doesn’t seem too concerned about it.

So now we are on theory three: Stop talking about it so much. Now we are just mentioning it on occasion and telling him to go to the potty without much preamble. It seems to be working better but it is still far from the breakthrough we have wanted to see. Still, forward progress is forward progress.

So I tell this tale of potty woe more to illustrate a point. That is, multiple solutions to problems always exist and the problem may not lend itself to one solution or another. In that case you have to choose one. The important thing is to monitor your progress for a period of time and if that solution does not appear to work, you must try another one.

We had many attempts at budgeting in our house and when one method failed we’d not revisit budgeting for months or even years. It wasn’t until we found the Dave Ramsey method that budgeting finally worked for us. Had we evaluated how the different methods performed for us more methodically, we would probably not have waited years before finding a solution.

So tackle that problem you’ve been struggling with, but be sure to evaluate what works and what doesn’t. Then make the appropriate changes to your solution if the results are not optimum.