Potty Training
Encouraging Potty Training
For many parents, potty training can be one of the most frustrating parts of early child rearing. In the act of weaning their children from diapers to the potty, a mother or father must learn to be a psychologist, a teacher, and, at times, a drill sergeant.
There are literally hundreds of books on the subject, many of them more than a few hundred pages in length, detailing the best methods to use in potty training, and certainly an entire field of child psychology devoted to the subject, and still, it has not yet been perfected to a science. Every child will learn at a different pace, and every child will respond to different techniques than the next child.
Serious study into the psychology of potty training began, of course, with Sigmund Freud, who put forth that potty training is one of the most important components in the early phases of an individual’s psychological development. The general theory being that a child must be taught that bodily desires do not always take immediate precedence over social and other imperatives. As such, a child who is potty trained poorly may grow up to experience difficulties in controlling their own inhibitions in a social setting, and a child who is potty trained too strictly may grow up to experience issues of self worth centred around cleanliness and perfection.
While many of Sigmund Freud’s theories have been considered less and less important over time by the psychological community at large, they remain the foundation upon which much of modern psychology is based, and Freud’s theories on potty training are no exception.
