Potty Training for Daycare: 9 Best Tips

Yes, you can potty train around nursery. Start with three consecutive days at home, ideally over a long weekend or annual leave, then hand over to nursery once your child has the idea. Most children are dry in the daytime in about a week, though some take two or three weeks, and a nursery day is really just the first big outing.

A child who is genuinely frightened of the potty or the toilet is not ready yet, and waiting is a legitimate choice rather than a delay you need to explain to anyone. The approach behind the Potty Training Box is built around the child saying when they need to go, rather than a parent or a nursery worker guessing on their behalf. Everything below is about keeping that idea intact once your child moves between two different adults and two different rooms.

Why the first three days should be at home, not at nursery

The first three days at home, nappy off and cotton pants on, are where a child learns the most about the whole process. Cotton pants matter here: unlike a padded training pant, they let a child actually feel a wet accident, which is part of why they learn faster in ordinary underwear than in anything designed to absorb it.

Short outings follow once the basics are in place, and a nursery session is effectively the first big outing your child takes on their own, without you there to prompt them. Before you start, have ready: a potty (useful mainly for the first three days), a toilet seat reducer, a step stool, at least fifteen pairs of pants, something to protect the mattress and sofa, a few small rewards, and pull-ups for sleeping. None of this needs to be elaborate; it just needs to be in the house before day one.

Most parents time the start to line up with a Friday, a bank holiday weekend, or a few days of annual leave, so the three intensive days fall before the first nursery day back. That gives your child two or three days of steady, one-to-one attention before they have to manage the same routine somewhere busier and less familiar.

What to ask your nursery or childminder before you start

Before day one, ask your child’s setting for their toileting policy in writing and find out which member of staff, usually the key person, will be leading it for your child. Policies vary a great deal between nurseries, preschools and individual childminders, so this is a conversation and a bit of negotiation, not a set of instructions you hand over.

Useful questions to ask directly:

• How many spare pairs of pants and trousers do you want us to send in, and how do soiled clothes come home?
• Will you use cotton pants rather than pull-ups during the session, to match what we are doing at home?
• Will you tell us what happened and roughly what time, rather than just a count of accidents?
• What do staff say to my child when they take them to the toilet, so we can use the same words at home?

Agreeing one shared phrase, even something as simple as asking your child directly rather than announcing a toilet trip, keeps the message the same wherever your child is that day.

What to do when nursery takes every child to the toilet every 30 minutes

Many UK settings run a group toilet round, taking a whole room of children at set intervals, because a member of staff is managing several children at once rather than one. That is a sensible way to manage a busy room, but it is not the same thing as the method taught in this programme, where the aim is for the child to say they need to go before anyone asks.

Rather than asking nursery to drop the round altogether, ask if staff can phrase the moment as a question rather than a command: ‘will you tell me when you need a wee?’ instead of simply sitting the child on the toilet. A group round on its own will not undo what your child has learned at home, but leaning on it too heavily can slow down the point where the child starts taking the initiative themselves, because someone else keeps taking it for them.

The genuine fixed moments that stay in place, both at home and at nursery, and after the training week as well as during it, are before and after sleep and before going out of the door. Outside of those two points, the question is ‘will you tell me when you need to go?’ rather than a timed sit-down.

A simple way to raise this with the key person: ‘we’re working on him telling us when he needs to go, so outside of nap time and before we leave, could you ask him rather than take him at a set time?’ Most staff are glad to have a clear steer rather than guessing what the parent wants.

Using the tracking schedules to work with nursery, not against them

The 14 tracking schedules in the box exist to record when this particular child actually drinks and goes, so a parent learns that child’s own timing and signals rather than following someone else’s. Each schedule uses the same columns: time of drinking, time on the toilet, whether nothing happened (yes or no), wee marked green for a success or red for an accident, poo marked green or red the same way, and a notes column for anything else worth remembering.

When you fill one in, it works best if your child drinks the cup in one go rather than in sips spread across the morning. That is the only way to see how much went in and how long it then took before they needed a wee, and that gap between drinking and needing to go is exactly what the schedule is designed to show.

Ask nursery to jot down rough times of wees, poos and accidents on the days your child is with them, even loosely, rather than a single tally at pick-up. A printable copy makes this easy to hand over: the potty training tracking chart can be printed for the setting’s own use alongside the ones you’re filling in at home.

None of this is a timetable to impose on your child. It is scaffolding you use to learn their pattern, and it comes down once your child is reliably telling you themselves, at home and at nursery alike.

Handovers: the five minutes at drop-off and pick-up that keep it consistent

At drop-off, take your child to the toilet before you leave the house, and again on arrival if the setting allows it, then give the key person one line on how the night and morning went. A quick ‘dry all night, one accident after breakfast’ takes seconds and saves the staff guessing.

At pick-up, ask for times rather than a headline number. ‘He had two accidents’ tells you far less than ‘one just after lunch and one at half past two’, because the second version shows you a pattern you can act on.

Keep the same words, the same praise and the same small rewards at home whichever way the nursery day went. If sticker cards are part of your routine, decide once whether they travel with your child or stay at home, and stick with that choice so the reward system doesn’t become confusing.

Never treat an accident as a failure, at home, in the car on the way back, or in front of your child at any point. Accidents are part of how a child learns to notice the feeling in time, not evidence that something has gone wrong.

Accidents at nursery: what is normal and what to change

Accidents in the first week or two at nursery are expected, and often more frequent there than at home, simply because a busy room full of play and noise makes it easier to miss the feeling of needing to go. This is not a sign the training has failed.

Send in more spare pants and trousers than you think you’ll need, clearly labelled, and check with staff what they’d like as a minimum. Most settings will tell you if they’re running low before it becomes a problem.

If accidents cluster at the same point in the session, for example always around outside play or always mid-morning, that is useful information rather than bad luck. Add that moment to the fixed points where staff prompt gently, without turning every part of the day into a scheduled sit-down.

Regression around illness, a house move, a new sibling or even a change of room at nursery is common and worth talking about openly with staff and with your child, without treating it as a reason to start the whole training over from scratch. A short setback usually settles once the disruption passes.

Some things stop being a training question and become a medical one: ongoing constipation, a child who seems to be holding in poo, pain when weeing or pooing, or repeated urinary symptoms. These belong with a GP or health visitor, not with any training programme, and are worth raising promptly rather than waiting them out.

Day 4 and day 5 are usually the hardest, including at nursery

Resistance most often shows up on day four or five of training, not day two, and it tends to happen because the child has grown tired of being asked ‘will you tell me when you need a wee?’ over and over. By that point they know the routine, and the constant question can start to feel like pressure rather than encouragement.

The fix is to ask less often, not more. Cutting back on the question hands more of the responsibility to your child, which is exactly the shift the whole method is working towards.

If your child is due at nursery around this point, mention it to the key person in advance. Knowing that day four or five often brings a wobble means staff read it as a normal part of the process rather than a sign the training isn’t working.

If it genuinely isn’t working after a real attempt, the method’s own advice is to stop and leave it a while before trying again, rather than pushing through a run of bad days. That pause is part of the plan, not an admission of defeat.

Poos at nursery, and why they often happen at home instead

Many children hold on to their poo until they’re back home, in a familiar bathroom with a familiar adult. That’s common, not unusual, and not something to correct on its own.

The box’s 20 poo stickers and the wee and poo diploma give this its own bit of recognition when it does happen, separate from wees, which can help a child feel proud of it rather than embarrassed.

Avoid pressuring or bribing a child to poo on demand, whether at nursery or at home; that tends to create tension around something that works best left alone.

Ongoing withholding, pain, or hard stools that don’t ease over time are worth raising with a GP or health visitor rather than managing through a training plan.

Nursery rules: can my child move rooms, and do they have to be out of nappies?

Settings are not expected to refuse care or exclude a child simply because they are still in nappies, and toileting support is generally treated as part of what an early years setting provides, according to ERIC, The Children’s Bowel and Bladder Charity. Room moves are more commonly tied to a child’s age and overall readiness than to toileting alone, so it’s worth checking your own setting’s specific policy rather than assuming a blanket rule.

A looming room move is a poor reason to start before your child is actually ready. The NHS potty training guidance notes that many children show signs of readiness from around 18 months onwards, though plenty are older, and pushing to meet an external deadline tends to backfire rather than speed things up.

Practical readiness looks like your child staying dry for an hour or two at a stretch, showing they know when they’ve done a wee or poo, and being able to follow a simple instruction. None of these require a fixed age, and they can appear at quite different times in different children.

The method is also used successfully with children who are autistic, have Down syndrome, or are non-verbal, usually over a longer stretch of time and by reading the child’s own signals closely rather than waiting for them to say something out loud.

What the Potty Training Box gives you that a nursery policy cannot

The box itself is a day-by-day programme rather than a policy document: a training booklet that walks a parent through the week, 7 instruction cards as a daily reminder of what to do, and 6 compliment cards for the moments you’ve run out of ways to say well done.

The 14 tracking schedules described above sit alongside 20 sticker cards in four sizes, 3, 5, 7 and 9 squares, used in that order so the reward comes quickly at three squares and then grows rarer as your child improves. The point of the growing gap is that the habit outlasts the stickers rather than stopping the moment the last card is filled.

There are also 100 animal stickers and 20 poo stickers, a wee and poo diploma for your child, and a year of access to a community where the brand’s experts answer questions seven days a week, which is useful precisely on the days that go badly, whether that’s day five at home or a rough patch at nursery.

The box is reusable for a later child, and parents who want to run the reward side their own way, without buying the full box again, can look at the separate reward system sold on its own. Parents who aren’t ready to commit to the full box yet, or want a lighter starting point, can also look at the Digital Handbook as a listed alternative.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

• NHS
• ERIC, The Children's Bowel and Bladder Charity

This article was written with AI assistance and checked by Dustin van de Sande.