Dr. Joseph Barone M.D. - It’s Not Your Fault!: Strategies for Solving Toilet Training and Bedwetting Problems

Its Not Your Fault!

Its Not Your Fault!

Strategies for Solving Toilet Training and Bedwetting Problems

Joseph Barone, MD

Rutgers University Press

New Brunswick, New Jersey, and London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Barone, Joseph, 1959

Its not your fault! : strategies for solving toilet training and bedwetting problems / Joseph Barone, MD.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 9780813569925 (paperback) ISBN 9780813569932 (e-book)

1. Toilet training. 2. Enuresis. I. Title.

HQ770.5.B37 2015

649'.62dc23 2014017495

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

Copyright 2015 by Joseph Barone

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is fair use as defined by U.S. copyright law.

Visit our website: http://rutgerspress.rutgers.edu

Contents

Its not your fault! That is what I tell frustrated parents who visit me because they are not able to toilet train their child. In most of these cases, the parents followed well-meaning but generally bad advice they discovered in a parenting book, on the Internet, or during a popular TV talk show.

Once, a mother of a thirteen-month-old told me that her friend, who regularly beat her at tennis, trained her perfect eleven-month-old by holding the baby over the toilet until blastoff. When the losing tennis player tried that method with her thirteen-month-old, she was crushed because that method did not work for her. She felt like she did something wrong and somehow failed her child and lost to her tennis friend yet again. Of course, I told her, Its not your fault. After all, she did not do anything wrong, she was just given well-meaning but bad advice from her friend. This advice may work well for one person but not for another.

In this book, I want to provide evidence-based advice and share my twenty-year experience as a pediatric urologist. Evidence-based advice means that the advice is based on science and facts. It means that it is more than just someones personal opinionit is advice based on testing and research. Evidence-based advice is the best advice available, and you should demand the best advice for your child. When advice is evidence based, it should work for many people, not just for one person, as in the tennis player example.

I am not only a pediatric urologist; I am also a father of four with a perfect toilet training batting average, and that did not happen by accident. I know my recommendations for toilet training work because they have been tested and have proven to be effective in the real world, as well as in a research setting. In fact, for the last ten years, I have spent thousands of hours gathering the large amount of information that is contained in this book. I want to pass that information on to you. And because my recommendations are evidence based, they work for everyone, not just that one tennis player.

The reason a lot of information on toilet training is misleading (or just plain wrong) is because very few scientific studies have been performed to help us better understand toilet training. Did you know that there are thousands of scientific studies on asthma but less than a few dozen studies on toilet training? With that kind of knowledge gap, we should not be surprised that, each year, over seven million children develop some kind of toilet training problem, like delayed toilet training, day wetting, or bedwetting. All of these common problems are discussed here, and following the toilet training advice in this book will prevent many of these problems from occurring in your child. In many cases, these problems could have been prevented if parents had access to evidence-based toilet training information instead of someones personal opinion.

Even though toilet training is a natural process, understanding some simple but important facts will allow parents to successfully and quickly train their children and avoid mountains of problems and years of disappointment. I am excited to share the information contained in this book because it has resulted from a lifetime of work, study, experience, and fun. The message I want to get across is that all parents can successfully and quickly toilet train their children, provided they have the essential, evidence-based information I provide here. And, if things do not go according to plan and a potty training problem occurs, you are covered: this book will tell you how to deal with common potty training problems like bedwetting or daytime wetting.

I would like to tell you a little bit about my training and experience so you can understand whereliterallyIm coming from. I am chief of pediatric urology at RutgersRobert Wood Johnson Medical School, located in New Brunswick, New Jersey. This position allows me to research urinary control problems in children and to find and develop new ways to think about these problems. I am like a detective trying to solve a mystery. I am also surgeon-in-chief at the Bristol-Myers Squibb Childrens Hospital at Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital, also located in New Brunswick. It is there that my colleagues and I have our pediatric continence center and where we have treated thousands of children with urinary control issues, from the most common to the most complex.

I think that a persons background and experience can really influence how he views things, and they affect the way he responds to different situations. Understanding a little bit about me personally might therefore help you understand how I have developed the concepts and recommendations that are contained in this book. I also want you to be able to see me as a person, not only as a professional writing a textbook. I would like to connect to you on a personal level because the main purpose of this book is to help you properly toilet train your child and also to help you overcome any toilet training problems your child might have or develop in the future. I want you to feel confident and comfortable with my recommendations so you can take charge of the situation and make things better for you and your child.

As I mentioned in the introduction, I have real-life experience in toilet training as a father and husband. My wife Anne Marie and I have successfully toilet trained our children following the simple principles outlined in this book. I admit that we are at somewhat of an advantage since I am a pediatric urologist and Anne Marie is a registered nurse, but the purpose of this book is to transfer that knowledge to you so that you can be equally successful in your home with your family.

I am fully trained and board certified in adult urology and pediatric urology. But I practice only pediatric urology, and almost 40 percent of my practice has to do with the management of children with different types of potty training and urinary control issues. These potty training issues might include problems like delayed toilet training, daytime urinary wetting, and bedwetting. This means that I have treated thousands of children with all kinds of urinary control issues over the years. There is virtually no problem that I have not seen and treated. I will address the more common of these problems in this book, and I will provide you with the same information and detailed advice that I provide to parents who come to my office for a formal consultation.

For the last fifteen years, I have also been medical director of the Pediatric Continence Center at the Bristol-Myers Squibb Childrens Hospital at Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital. I developed this center fifteen years ago because I saw a need to have a place where common toilet training problems and questions could be studied and treated. Toilet training problems are very common, even if they are not talked about that much. Lets face it, talking about your childs potty training problem does not make for the best teatime conversation. The Pediatric Continence Center provides a place where these very common problems can be openly discussed and addressed.