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Our three year old boy has been "potty trained" for over a year but he still has constant accidents. When he does, he doesn't even notice his pants are wet and just keeps playing.

It's rare for him to go pee by himself - we usually have to convince him to go. Even that is a struggle since he never wants to interrupt what he's doing.

Any ideas?

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    Patience. Only time and constant positive re-enforcement from you will fix that. Have you tried a daily reward? "If you can go X without an incident, you can get a new comic book?"
    – user29389
    Aug 31, 2017 at 13:56
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    You said "he" - this is fortunate, because it gives you a secret weapon.
    – corsiKa
    Sep 1, 2017 at 16:08
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    @corsiKa That was a main part of our potty training regimen for my son.
    – user29389
    Sep 1, 2017 at 16:19

1 Answer 1

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With my son we spent some time with no pants or underwear, to increase body awareness. I took him out to the back yard with no pants or underwear on him and we played out there for long enough that he peed a few times (we did this for several days, I don't remember how many exactly).

Pretty soon it got to be fun for him to "water the plants," and he was pretty clear about when pee was coming out. It also gave me a chance to figure out approximately how long he could go between pees, so when we went back into the house I could set a timer and have him go to the potty when it was time (originally once every 45 mins to an hour).

My son didn't start going by himself until he'd been "potty trained" for about four months, AND he felt like he could do each step by himself (e.g. Pulling down his own pants was a challenge at first). I'd say the only downside to the backyard method was that he kept asking to pee in the backyard for a while after we stopped doing that :) but I kept reminding him that the goal was to pee in the potty like mama and dada, and he eventually got over it.

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    I would upvote this several times if I could. +1 Aug 31, 2017 at 15:11
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    MAA - I don't have any interesting potty-training stories; it all went pretty smoothly (though that was 25+ years ago.) My 2.5 year old son once saw a friend of his pee against a tree in a nice park (his parents told him too.) From that day on, every time we went to that park, he wanted to pee on a tree. :) Sep 1, 2017 at 14:49

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