Oh crap! You’re a condescending jerk.

I was going to wait until I’d actually potty trained my kid to review this, but 1) I need to clear my backlog of reviews, 2) I’m probably not going to get around to potty training in the next two weeks, and 3) my kid has some special needs that may make potty training harder, so even if Glowacki’s method doesn’t work for us it’s not necessarily an indictment of her method. So here we go.

Basically the author runs some kind of potty training consultation service and has potty trained a bajillion kids. She thinks the magic window is 20-30 months, our culture has really dumb ideas about potty training, and the reward system is a disaster. She has a method for potty training, and from what I can gather on Goodreads and Amazon, it super duper works. She also has a very no-bullshit attitude that crosses over into brash, rude, condescending, and superior about 98% of the time.

Some of her methods run pretty contrary to the current potty training wisdom, but she does a pretty good job placing the current stuff in historical context. For example the trend now is to wait for “readiness signs” and not “rush it” and so forth. Apparently this is a long-term backlash from potty training methods in the 1940s when children were strapped to potty chairs very young and taught using horrible-sounding methods. The pendulum (thankfully) swung so far from that that it swung all the way to the opposite extreme, which is also not great. It makes sense, and like I said, the reviews seem to suggest that her method is super effective. I’m going to give it a try. (She’d have a problem with my saying that. There is no trying, only doing. Whatever.) However, I absolutely hated her attitude and probably personality. I think she’s a jerk, but probably a jerk who knows how to potty train, so.