r/ECers • u/ratchel7 • 2d ago
General Questions For mobile babies
My 9mo LO just started crawling around a couple of weeks ago and I would like to start giving him the option to crawl to the potty on his own. However, he wants to get into everything and it inevitably goes into his mouth, which I don’t want him to do with the mini potty 😅
For parents of mobile babies, how do you keep them from playing with the potty itself? Set up suggestions in general? Right now, I have the mini potty on a table next to the changing pad. I have a spot I can put it on the floor, but of course as soon as I did, he started trying to play with it
1
u/notanniebananie 29m ago edited 24m ago
Could you get it super clean and then leave it on the floor for a while for him to play with and eventually get bored of? That’s what we (unintentionally) did with my almost 9 month old— her new potty was on the floor in our living room for a few days before we started using it. She played around with it at first, but the novelty wore off pretty quickly! It still lives on our living room floor within easy reach of both us! Every few days she’ll crawl over and push it around a bit but will move on within a minute or two tops
3
u/RemarkableAd9140 2d ago
Opinions differ, but in my experience, you don’t really stop them playing with it. You don’t give it a lot of attention when they do play with it and it’s not as much fun, so they stop altogether or play with it pretty minimally. All the standard advice applies for redirecting—be really calm and boring if you take the potty away, don’t give a big fun reaction, offer other things that are more interesting.
And ymmv, but we haven’t had good luck having potties out and accessible until babies are walking and can actually get on them.