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So your toddler is now over 18 months old, and you are quite ready to be done with diapers. You are ready to enter the brave new world of big-boy pants and frantic trips to the closest bathroom. But where do you begin?

The shelves of bookstores and libraries are filled with how-to manuals to help parents get through what can be a trying and messy period in their child’s growth. Despite their colorful covers and clever titles, I have found that most potty training books out there share a few common features:

• They all stress being aware of the child’s readiness for potty training, and almost all of them list the same list of signs listed on the American Academy of Pediatrics website.
• They all reassure you that your child will, at some point, be out of diapers and use the toilet, whether or not you “train” her.
• They all stress positive reinforcement rather than punishment.

Beyond these commonalities, though, there are some very real differences between the different books you might find. Below, I’ve given you the run-down on three of the most popular books out there right now.

Toilet Training in Less Than a Day
By:Nathan H. Azrin PhD, and Richard M. Foxx, PhD
Publisher: Pocket Books, 1974

Who wouldn’t want to be done with the whole messy prospect of toilet training in less than a single day? It is no wonder that this classic manual is still in print and still selling quite well. Developed from their research with the “profoundly retarded,” this was the first manual to stress positive reinforcement in teaching children to be independently able to take care of their bathroom needs. This book focuses exclusively on conditioning the child. First, you introduce the child to the idea of using the toilet through role-playing with a drink-and-wet doll. Then you spend an entire day, preferably in the kitchen, plying your child with liquids and practicing their new skill over and over–at least ten times successfully. The book is comprehensive and gives you step-by-step instructions for conditioning your child to recognize the signals his body is sending him and to effectively deal with those signs. This book is helpful because it stresses a child’s independence, and it emphasizes the steps necessary to teach a child to be able to toilet themselves, without the parent’s help.

This book, however, is not for parents who are uncomfortable with the idea of isolating a child and fairly intensively re-conditioning them. The only way this technique can work is for a child to be removed from their normal routine and activities for an entire day. This is not a technique that is for parents who want children to grow into toileting themselves. While this is the first of the train-your-child-in-a-day line, it is by no means the last. There are many different texts that subscribe to this intensive, one-day approach. For all, intensive is the key word, and if your child is not ready or willing, you could be setting you and your child up for failure.

Toilet Training: The Brazelton Way
By: Dr. T. Berry Brazelton and Dr. Joshua Sparrow
Publisher: Da Capo Press 2004

Apparently “America’s Favorite Pediatrician” (who knew?), Brazelton provides an antidote for the all-in-one-day movement. We are asking quite a lot of our children, Dr. Brazelton writes, when we ask them to flush their, um, productions down the drain. Toilet training can be traumatic, and it really only makes sense to allow a child to train themselves when—and only when—they are ready for it. This is the original “child-centered” method of toilet training children, and it focuses extensively on a child’s readiness, especially their physical and cognitive ability to let go of their bodily waste. This child-centered method is the back-bone for much of what we read in other books and online today. In part, its popularity is due to a Proctor and Gamble marketing campaign in the 1960s that used Dr. Brazelton. Hands-off potty training put children’s needs in the forefront, but it also kept thousands of babies in their disposable diapers much, much longer than they previously had been.

With its hands-off technique, this book is comforting (your child will give up diapers, eventually) for parents worried about their children, it is not overly helpful. Stand back and watch. Encourage but never force. You don’t necessarily need a book to tell you not to do anything.

The No-Cry Potty Training Solution
By: Elizabeth Pantley
Publisher: McGraw Hill, 2007

This is perhaps the most comprehensive and practical of the potty training manuals I looked at. Pantley, the author of The No-Cry Sleep Solution is back, this time bringing her expertise to the bathroom. What is most helpful about this book is it does promote any single idea, but presents parents with several different strategies for helping their children learn to use the bathroom. It provides parents a very comprehensive readiness quiz that ascertains both the child’s and the parent’s readiness to begin training.

Rather than providing a set of step-by-step instructions, this book introduces parents to some of the most successful approaches to potty-training and stresses the importance of the child’s own personality. Almost one-third of the book is dedicated to answering parents’ questions about some of the hang-ups they may experience while training.

Potty Training Sucks: What to Do When Diapers Make You Miserable
By: Joanne Kimes, with Kathleen Laccinole
Publisher: Adams Media, 2007

Filled with bawdy puns and enough sarcasm to entertain, Joanne Kimes recent addition to her things-that-suck line of books is an informal look into the world of potty training’s “doo-doos and don’ts.” With her ironic delivery and oh-so bad wordplay, Kimes read is fun and entertaining and it, surprisingly enough, does give some basic hints and advise for problems parents might face. It’s real value, however, isn’t in the practical how-to steps for potty training. Through her experience, Kimes insists that the only way to potty train is to give up trying. That, she tells us, is the only thing that worked for her.

This is the book you want if you need some perspective on just how funny this all really is. It’s not for the squeamish, but it is a lot of fun.

by Lisa D.

Photo graciously provided by thejbird, through a Creative Commons license, some rights reserved