Puppy Potty Training Tips

If you are the proud owner of an adorable new puppy, you may be wondering "What is the best way to potty train a puppy?" I wasn't too concerned myself with that that question 5 months ago when we got our little one pound chihuahua puppy whom we named "Little Man".

We had 2 other little female dogs who favored me, their "mother", and my husband was a bit jealous, so we decided to get a little male puppy so he could be "Daddy's Little Man".

And he certainly has become the apple of his daddy's eye...with one glaring exception - we had such a terrible time potty training our little puppy, it nearly drove us over the edge. For some reason he was not as easy to potty train as our two little female chihuahuas.

We tried the potty patch that was the rage on TV, with no luck at all. We tried potty pads and he'd have nothing to do with them. In fact he'd go potty all around the pads, but not on them. We were very frustrated with this new puppy behavior. I read somewhere that little dogs are harder to potty train, and that was very discouraging to hear. After all, he was very little, literally one pound! We could hold him in one hand.

My sister has 2 Boston Terriers and I had heard all her potty training horror stories about her dogs, but never imagined it might be the same for us. I assumed it was a problem with that breed. She said it took over a year to train her first Boston, even with crates. We never tried crate training with our little man, as it just seemed unnatural to us. In hindsight, maybe we should have thought more about that.

We spent many sleepless nights trying to keep him from going on the carpet, or getting him to signal us when he needed to go. I was always too worried about falling asleep, there might as well have been a newborn baby in the family.

We've also spent more money than we should have on different pet stain removers and carpet cleaners, with mixed results. Some claim to work, but they sure didn't work on our carpet.

I read many articles about puppy potty training techniques and applied almost every one. We finally resorted to watching some educational puppy potty training videos geared to our situation and that is what finally helped us to train our "hard to train" little puppy.

So my answer to the question "what is the best way to potty train a puppy" is to go watch some videos by the dog training experts and don't rely on family or friends advice. You can avoid the headache of puppy training problems that way.