·4 min read

Why 'Trying' Should Count as Success

The most productive shift many families make in their toilet routine is redefining what counts. Here's the case for treating effort as the outcome.

Jordan

Writes from the parent side of an encopresis treatment plan. Not a medical professional.

The single biggest change some families notice from using Quiet Sit isn't a change in the child. It's a change in how the parent measures the day.

In most sit-time systems, sticker charts, apps with streaks, notebooks by the toilet, there's an implicit hierarchy of outcomes:

  • Done, the child pooped. Best possible day.
  • Tried, the child sat, but nothing happened. OK, but not the goal.
  • Skipped, the child didn't sit at all. Bad.

That hierarchy feels intuitive. It also almost certainly makes things worse.

Why the hierarchy is a problem

Here's the thing about a hierarchy of outcomes: it evaluates your child on something they don't fully control.

Whether a child poops during sit time depends on:

  • What's in their colon at that specific moment
  • What their body's signal-response cycle is doing
  • What their stress level is
  • Whether they're on stool softener and how it's working today
  • Whether they're afraid of pooping (which is often the actual root issue)
  • A dozen other things you can't measure

The child's effort on any given day is basically constant. They showed up. They sat. That's the part they can control.

If your measurement system treats effort and outcome as equal, effort becomes the safest thing to reward, because it's the thing the child can consistently produce. If your measurement system treats effort as less important than outcome, you're back to evaluating your child on things outside their control. Which, over months, teaches them that daily sit time is a test they're often failing.

What "trying counts" looks like in practice

Redefining trying as the goal doesn't mean pretending outcomes don't matter. It means changing what you communicate, with your voice, your body, and your systems, about what a good day looks like.

A good day is: they sat.

  • They sat, and they pooped: great.
  • They sat, and they didn't: also great.
  • They sat, and they cried, and they got up: still counts. They tried.
  • They didn't sit at all: some days that's the right call. Try again tomorrow.

In Quiet Sit, this shows up in a few concrete ways:

  • All three outcomes look the same in your history. No color coding, no ranking, no red dots. When you look back at last week, "Done" and "Tried" and "Skipped" show up as equal-weight rows.
  • There are no streaks. Streaks quietly redefine your goal from "sit today" to "don't break the streak." They also make skipping, which is sometimes the right choice, feel like failure.
  • The weekly reflection asks "what felt easier this week?" Not "how many days did you succeed?" The framing decides what you notice.

What kids feel

Kids notice how their parents categorize things. If they can tell that "Done" is treated differently from "Tried", through the smallest cues, tone of voice, choice of words, they'll pick up on the hierarchy immediately.

And once they've picked up on the hierarchy, they'll start avoiding sit time when they don't feel like they can produce the "good" outcome. Because who wants to sit through five minutes of evaluation you might fail?

The reverse is also true. When kids feel that showing up is the whole game, showing up gets easier. Which is exactly what you want, because showing up is what actually rebuilds the routine, day after day, over months.

The bar you're actually trying to clear

Whatever measurement system you use, the question to ask is: what does my daily bar produce?

If the bar is "a productive sit," it produces: tension, avoidance, and shame on hard days.

If the bar is "showed up and sat," it produces: consistency, low stakes, and enough time on the toilet, over weeks and months, for the body to do what it needs to do anyway.

That's the shift. It's not a soft one; it's the one that actually works.

Try it tonight. When your child sits, whatever happens, tell them: "You sat. Good job." That's it. Nothing about outcomes. See what changes.

If you want a version of this baked into an app, Quiet Sit is designed exactly this way from the ground up. If you're tracking encopresis treatment across months of maintenance meds and check-ins, EncoPath is our companion app for that piece, same principles, applied to the notes side. Neither one keeps a scoreboard.