When your child is first learning to listen to their body signals, working in partnership with you can help them to get their wees in the potty. Nurse Rebecca Mottram explains the difference between prompting and overprompting to help you to support your child to become toilet independent and self initiate using the potty,.
The problem with overprompting when potty training
When you’re helping your child learn how to use the potty (whether baby pottying or potty training), frequent reminders to sit on the potty can become almost automatic.
It’s common practise for parents and early year professionals to prompt a toddler to try for a wee every 10–20 minutes, or before every transition (going out, coming home etc). This approach nearly always comes from the intention to avoid accidents, with the logic that frequent bladder emptying will prevent them. However, prompting this often can actually do more harm than good when it comes to helping toddlers learn to recognise and respond to their own body signals.
It’s important to remember that the goal is not to avoid accidents, but for your child to learn how to be toilet independent. So be mindful of overprompting.
What Is Overprompting?
A healthy bladder functions by filling gradually, stretching, and then sending a clear signal to the brain that gives the body the feeling the bladder is full. Your child being able to sense that feeling and understand what it means is a vital part of being able to sucessfully avoid accidents. If we overprompt (meaning we remind a child to use the toilet more often than their bladder is actually filling) the bladder may not be full enough to send that signal. If your child then tries to wee, there’s no urge, no meaningful sensation and no internal cue to learn from. Instead of responding to their body, they’re responding to us.
The Impact on Body Awareness
Toilet learning is fundamentally about interoception – noticing and responding to internal body signals. When we prompt before a child feels anything:
– We take away the opportunity for them to practise recognising early bladder sensations.
– Children often learn to ignore subtle signals because they’re used to adults telling them when to go.
Over time, this can significantly affect your childs engagement and cooperation with the learning process.
The Impact on Cooperation
From a child’s perspective, they’re being frequently interrupted and asked to stop playing. The request feels unnecessary or intrusive and when there’s no body signal to justify the interruption, resistance rises. Repeated prompting can lead to:
– Automatic “No.”
– Power struggles.
– Withholding.
– Reduced willingness to engage.
Cooperation is much easier when a child is feeling the signal from their body at the time your promt.
The Impact on Bladder Function
The bladder is a muscle. It works best when allowed to fill and empty fully. Regular fiulling and emptying strengthens the bladder muscles and improves bladder health. It also reduces the chance of infections and other problems from developing. If the bladder is emptied too often, before it has been stretched enough to send a signal, this can reduce its function and lead to:
– Small, incomplete wees.
– Reduced bladder capacity.
– Frequent voiding patterns.
– Bladder instability in some children.
When children empty before the bladder has properly filled, the muscle doesn’t get the opportunity to stretch and strengthen. Over time, this can contribute to urgency or frequency issues.
Too many interruptions disrupt the loop.
The solution
The best way to avoid this is to learn your child’s timing and any body language that can help you understand that their body may be sending them a signal.
You can do this through:
– Watching for subtle cues such as fidgeting, hopping from foot to foot or grabbing their crotch etc.
– Using a nappy cloth to understand intervals (the cloth will feel wet so you will know when they have peed. You can use the cloth inside a nappy).
– Observing your child’s signals and giving information and being curious about what you see to help them identify their body signals and make the connection.
– Talking about body feelings yourself, to role model how your body lets you know
– Recognising and accepting accidents as a vital part of learning.
Nurse Rebecca Mottram is an advocate for Baby Pottying and a potty training expert. She is the author of two books; The Baby Pottying Guide and Positively Potty, the host of the Go Potty Podcast and founder of the Little Bunny Bear shop. If you are trying to resolve a potty problem, you can explore Rebecca’s free resources, join her Facebook group or request a private consultation.
One response to “Prompting to use the potty”
[…] to respond to. Your child is only responding to your demand, not what their body is telling them. Read more about overprompting in my recent blog, or watch my video […]