In this video I’m going to be sharing eight tips for night potty training a two-year-old. Hi guys, welcome or welcome back to my channel. For those of you that are new my name is Kara and I have a little boy who’s nearly two and a half years old called Ben.
Today I’m going to be sharing our tips for overnight potty training. It’s something that we have been doing now over the past month and it has been really successful so I want to share some of the things that have really worked for us.
So we day and nap potty trained Ben when he was around 18 months old, so just under a year ago now. We did use something called the ‘Oh crap!’ potty training method and it was really successful for us.
Now we have made a whole video on how we did this and the kind of advantages and the challenges that we faced with potty training a toddler so young. So I will link that above and below for you.
It also helps to set the scene for our potty training ethos. Now with this Oh Crap! method, it does suggest that you tackle day and night potty training at the same time and that that’s actually the easiest way to do it.
We weren’t fully comfortable with that because Ben was so young when we were potty training him and also he wasn’t a fantastic sleeper, so the idea of getting him up at night to do dream peas and things like that just was not something that I was in love with.
So we decided to just day train him and wait for a later point when we were going to night potty train him. We felt that now it was the right time. He’s very competently trained during the day now, he has very very few accidents, he’s also settled in really well to our new house, he’s in a single bed now instead of a crib as well so he can independently get in and out and we just felt that it was time to go for it.
So on the 31st of December, it was like our new year’s resolution to night potty train Ben and then we put them to bed without a nappy on. And over the past month we have really learned what works for us.
So let’s get started with my eight tips. So number one is to really talk to your toddler about what’s going to happen and prepare them for the fact that you’re going to ditch the nappies and that they are not going to be going to the toilet in their bed.
So we really told Ben that he was going to be just like mummy and daddy and no longer wear nappies at night time. To be fair, I was super delighted by this prospect. We did use cloth nappies so it’s been a long time that we have been washing nappies overnight.
I will link my video about cloth nappies above and below as well. They have been fantastic and I would definitely never go back but I think telling Ben every night before he went to bed in the week leading up to it made it not a big surprise and made him him feel ready to go to bed without a nappy on.
My second tip is to wait until you feel that your toddler is ready to go through the night potty training process. So Ben wasn’t consistently dry through the night before we decided to night potty train him.
However he did have quite light nappies, they didn’t tend to be really heavy in the morning, and also maybe once a week he would go two, three, four nights when he was waking up with a dry nappy.
And you really have to feel that it’s time as well because your confidence is everything as with everything in potty training, I think if you go into it with a positive attitude knowing that it’s possible, it is far more likely to succeed.
I was a little bit doubting myself and when I researched night potty training because a lot of the websites suggested you should wait until they were three and a half four years old before you tried night potty training.
But just like the day potty training, I felt he was ready and so we decided to go for it. At number three, I would suggest completely ditching the nappies and just putting them to bed just in their pyjamas.
Of course you’ve got to have some consideration for your mattress. I know that you can get some disposable mattress covers that you can just throw away in the middle of the night if you need to.
That’s not something I was super into as you can probably tell from the fact I was a cloth nappy user, I don’t love disposable things, but we did get this mattress protector which I’m just going to show you.
It’s essentially like an incontinence pad that goes underneath Ben’s sheets so he didn’t really feel there was any difference. It’s soft, it doesn’t rustle or anything like that during the night and it’s really absorbent and you can just pop it in the wash and it dries really well once there’s been an accident on it, so that really worked for us.
And I will try and link that one that we have below in the description box in case that’s helpful. And so leading on from that one at number four, I would say embrace the accidents. That’s why completely ditching the nappies works because like everything in life, you learn from your mistakes and the accidents are just the learning process.
So if Ben did have an accident, and it didn’t take him very long to actually get it – in the past month we’ve only had around three accidents, but we just got him out of bed we changed him we got him to help us change the sheets and we didn’t make a huge deal of it.
We just and told him yeah there was pee pee in his bed and now we had to change it and we’d really love it if next time he could get his pee pee in the potty and let us know if he needs help to go to the toilet overnight.
My fifth tip is quite a difficult one and it is to do a dream pee with your toddler just before you go to bed. So we only did this for the first week to week and a half of our night potty training process and that was just to build Ben up to going the whole night without needing to go to the potty.
Just before we’d go to bed around 11 o’clock, we would come into Ben’s room, we’d wake him up and we’d sit him on the potty and then just put them back to bed. Some experts say that this isn’t a great idea because it kind of trains them to pee while they’re half asleep.
Ben, most of the time did really wake up so much so that sometimes it was difficult to get him to go back to sleep. But with just it being for a short period it wasn’t a huge problem. It did however totally break Thomas’s heart especially to wake Ben up from his sleep when he was really confused and tired and wondered what was going on but it did help us to build up to going a full night without needing the potty.
At number six I would suggest reducing liquids around an hour to an hour and a half before bedtime. Now Ben has luckily never been a toddler who has a lot of milk before bed and he was breastfed until he was 18 months old and then that’s never really been replaced by a bedtime drink.
He just has a big drink of milk with his dinner which is normally around half past six and then he goes to bed around eight o’clock. So this just helps us know that he has emptied his bladder before bed.
However if he is particularly thirsty and he does ask for other things to drink before bed, we will give that to him, but we will then as a consequence wake him for a dream pee because we know that he’s had a lot more to drink later on in the evening.
So I think it’s just about monitoring it and really setting your child up for success. Tip number seven is to make sure that they go to the potty the last thing before they go to bed. So even if they’ve been maybe just 15 minutes or half an hour before I’ll still make sure that we just go back to the potty and to make sure that he’s completely emptied his bladder before bed.
And just putting this into your nighttime routine and it makes it very easy to remember and keep up with. And my final tip is just to be prepared for the accidents, be prepared for nighttime changes of sheets and also just prepare yourself.
Don’t be stressed out. I know it’s so hard in the middle of the night because I think we all just want to sleep but I think that us getting stressed out about it also stresses out the toddlers and having a really positive approach to it really helps the whole process.
Now I’d love to know if you have any other tips for night party training or even day potty training below in the comments and I make videos about being a toddler parent every single week so if you’ve enjoyed today’s video and it’s helped you, please have a think about hitting subscribe below and checking out some of my other videos all about being a mum to two-year-old.
If you’re just about to night potty train your toddler then good luck. I am sending so many positive potty training vibes your way. I am sure it will be absolutely fine and you’ll feel so much better once you’re completely nappy free.
I absolutely love it! Thank you so much for watching toda,y hit the like button if it has given you some value, and I really hope you’ll join me again in another video. Bye bye!
