I’ve now house trained two species, so clearly, I’m an expert – except when it comes to small humans. I teach people how to house-train dogs, but do I teach human children? Not so much. Want some entertainment and thoughts about puppy training for human toddlers? Read on. 

I have an 8-month-old puppy right now; he came to my home when he was 17 weeks old with a strong preference for urinating and defecating in a tray with wood pellets. He had no other known preferences. I also have a 2-year-old human child; he developed a strong preference for urinating and defecating in a diaper throughout his life. And thankfully, he also had no other known preferences, whew! This is our starting point for both beings. 

In theory, house training a dog and potty training a human are very similar. If I’ve helped you house train a dog, you’ve heard me say “you’re just creating a new preference.” We’re helping to build a preference to urinate and defecate (I’m going to say pee and poop moving forward, to sound less stodgy) in appropriate places of our choice. 

We got lucky – the puppy figured it out fast. He pottied exclusively in his tray, then as I gave him appropriately timed breaks outdoors and rewarded pooping and peeing outside I was able to phase out the tray. Side note, the tray was a strong preference. I once caught him getting in a laundry basket to try to poop because it most resembled a tray once the tray was gone. I then took him outside because I don’t like poopy clothes. 

The only thing I will say is that the puppy has a preference for one spot in my yard, which isn’t bad, but he can hold it for a long time to wait to go to his preferred spot. If we’re at an event, sometimes other things are way more interesting to him than attending to his bladder. This is not always easy to deal with, especially when I know he won’t have a chance for another couple of hours and he…doesn’t speak my language quite yet.

Now, the real challenge – the small human. There is a learning curve for the instructor here. I read a book, and that’s the closest I got to a hands-on experience before trying it myself. The new preference we’re trying to create is a very small target. Why would anyone choose to pee or poop into a porcelain bowl? And even weirder – a small plastic replica of that on the ground? There were struggles.

A more recent struggle, the funny part about his developing preference is that once I helped my small human develop it, he didn’t generalize well. He had been using tiny gray and white potties and our travel potty that inserts into the larger public toilets just fine. I recently bought an extra on a whim. It was green. How dare I? Green? You can’t pee in a green potty according to my child. It took three entire weeks for him to accept the green potty, and truly only because I brought it out when he was feeling a pee emergency.

Anyway, back on track – developing this potty preference, I realized I had far fewer crutches than I do in house training a dog. When I want a break from constant vigilance while training a puppy, I can just pop them in a crate that they prefer to keep clean. Without this, I truly had to be…constantly vigilant. No joke. It was about 5 days of just staring at my child. There is no place where he had any negative feelings about peeing – he’d always been in a diaper where he could pee and poop freely without negative feelings. Nowhere was safe! I found this difficult as a veteran crate-time scheduler.

In both species’ cases, early on, when you catch the learner making a mistake, you interrupt calmly and move them to an appropriate place. I’ve never had a dog reject being placed outside, but my child strongly rejected being placed on a potty. Strongly. This is the second thing I found challenging. Who knew a child who sits in so many places would hate sitting in the one place I needed him to sit? After a few tears, we realized toy cars and other comfort items really improved the seating area. 

Some of the other fun things to note are that both require extreme consistency and emotional neutrality. I will say, waiting for a human child to pee indoors is way better than waiting for a puppy to pee in the snow! I cannot say that enough. Either way, telling a puppy or a child that you really, really want them to pee does not impress them.

I hope you fare well in your journey with new puppies or new human toilet users. For those not on either of those journeys, perhaps you will now have a bit more empathy for those going through one or both. You may have noticed this wasn’t a “how to” – please don’t use this as a guide. It was not intended to be, and it will fail you. Instead, as you work with dogs or humans (or any species) to develop new preferences, the best advice I can give you – “Don’t get the green potty.”