What to do when toddler keeps using the potty to stay awake at bedtime?

Question

We are working on potty training our two year old girl and it is interfering with our bedtime routine. She will often keep requesting to use the potty, knowing that we will take her out of bed to go to the bathroom, sometimes as many as four times in a night. It became obvious pretty quickly that she was just delaying bedtime because she would just try and talk with us while on the potty and make jokes. We have been trying to make it as boring as possible, by standing out in the hall so that she does not have someone to directly interact with while on the potty.

How can we reduce the number of times we take her to the potty after putting her to bed without giving her a complex about the toilet? I am afraid to deny her the extra potty runs since sometimes she actually does go on the extra times (thought more often not).

Answer 1

"Ok, one more trip and then straight to bed." worked well for us... not only with the potty but also with "I'm thirsty" and "I need to give mommy a kiss good night" and ... all his other stalling tactics. Basically he realized that whatever thing he wanted to do to stall getting to bed would replace the next story I was about to read, and make it the last thing before lights out. He would rather have the stories and he knew I'd read more stories if he stayed in bed. As soon as we realized he was stalling and not actually needing whatever, boom, cut off. He very quickly stopped stalling entirely... quite often now he falls asleep listening to stories.