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Toilet Training Twins or Triplets
Tips for Teaching Multiples to Use the Potty By Gwen Morrison
"Each family needs to evaluate their own situation individually," says Lynda Haddon, owner of multiplebirthfamilies.com, a resource for parents expecting multiples. "Multiples are often not ready to meet the same expectations of singleton children."
Haddon also points out that most experts believe boys generally take longer to train than girls, so mixed sets of multiples will probably be ready to toilet train at different times. "Parents know their children best and are best suited to decide when toilet training can begin, in spite of feedback from family and friends," she says.
Just because two children are born at the same time, it doesn't necessarily mean they are going to be ready to toilet train at the same time. Each child needs to be treated as an individual, with his or her own developmental time frames. "I would recommend that each child be encouraged in all areas of their lives," says Haddon. "If a child is forced to do something they are just not ready to do, it can create a traumatic disaster. We wouldn't force the second or third child to sit up or roll over just because one is already doing so. Expecting one (or more) to conform to his co-multiple's readiness could cause everyone problems and headaches."
"It is not necessarily written in stone that just because they are multiples, they will all be ready at the same time to be potty trained," says Nancy Langdon, a mother of 11-year-old twin boys from Austin, Texas. "In fact, most multiples are not ready at the same time."
Langdon says she has found that if parents of multiples think of it as raising two or more children the same age, instead of thinking of them as twins or triplets, it causes less self-induced stress. Langdon says parents often set themselves up for frustration by thinking that because their children were born at the same time, they are the same. It's especially important to future development to consider each child as an individual and not put unnecessary expectations on a child who is not as advanced in a certain area as the others. Kids are all different – even multiple birth children!
"Moving to each child's inner beat is essential in order to have the maximum amount of success," says Haddon. "It is extremely important that parents refrain from comparing their children. This usually has lasting negative effects on the children themselves and can impede the training process."
