Personality and potty training

Personality and potty training are extremely interconnected. Neuropsychologist Peter Stavinoha, PhD, explains the importance of understanding your child's personality traits as they relate to potty training process.
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Personality and potty training

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Knowing your child's personality in terms of potty training, as well as well beyond potty training, can give parents lots of cues to how their child operates. So the things that they are going to respond better to, or not respond well to, can help steer a parent towards certain strategies. For example, there are some children that are just temperamentally strong-willed, stubborn kinds of kids. For those kinds of kids, they need to be in charge of the process, and parents need to let them be in charge. It's important to not try and over-power the child or control them, especially if they are strong-willed. Similarly, if you have a child who is anxious or more withdrawn, more of an observer, not very adventurous, those are kids that may be very slow to engage the process. If parents push it too hard, that may actually provoke fear and anxiety in that child, which in the long run, is going to slow the process down. Those are examples of the kinds of clues that parents can get, simply by understanding their child's temperament, which can help guide parents toward the right strategy.

Personality and potty training are extremely interconnected. Neuropsychologist Peter Stavinoha, PhD, explains the importance of understanding your child's personality traits as they relate to potty training process.

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Peter Stavinoha, PhD

Neuropsychologist

Peter L. Stavinoha, PhD, ABPP, is a board certified clinical neuropsychologist in Dallas, Texas.  He directs the Neuropsychology Service at Children’s Medical Center of Dallas and he is Professor in Psychology/Psychiatry at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. He was named Distinguished Psychologist for 2005 by the Dallas Psychological Association. Dr. Stavinoha specializes in the cognitive, behavioral, and emotional aspects of developmental disabilities and acquired brain injury in children. As a general parenting expert, he is regularly interviewed in the media, Dallas morning television, Parents and Parenting Magazines, and numerous parenting blogs. Together with Sara Bridget Au, he is co-author of Stress-Free Potty Training. He has also authored several chapters in scholarly texts on subjects ranging from pediatric concussion to brain tumors in children. Dr. Stavinoha received a BA in Psychology from the University of Notre Dame and a PhD in Educational Psychology from the University of Texas at Austin. Dr. Stavinoha completed a residency in Clinical Neuropsychology at the Medical College of Wisconsin, and is a member of the American Psychological Association, the International Neuropsychological Society, and the National Academy of Neuropsychology. Dr. Stavinoha has a 16-year old son named Joe.

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