My daughter trained my granddaughter by giving her a big incentive: getting promoted from day care to pre-school. But, like you, I think maturity has a lot to do with it.
While in grad school I would regularly sit for the son of a friend, and this youngster's reward was getting to tear off some toilet paper. I'm not sure how they originally discovered that this was his favorite activity ever, but he loved nothing more. They started going through TP like no one's business. So, they switched to letting him tear off one sheet when he was completely finished, regardless of the activity he was finishing. Well, this young man developed an ability to stop and start urine like a light switch. He would go for a few seconds, stop, swear he was finished, and get to tear off his sheet of TP. Ten minutes later, he'd be back. He never had accidents, but he nearly wore a path in the carpet back and forth from the bathroom.
M & M's in the house are almost always a bad idea - no matter what you are doing.
We tried M&Ms, too. I think the key steps that were left out in your description of this method are: 1)make sure he is drinking LOTS of fluids, so that he can almost always produce something; 2) limit the number of times he's in the bathroom to once or twice an hour; and 3) give more M&Ms on a graduated scale of effort. For instance, if he says to you he has to go, actually makes it to the bathroom OK, produces, AND shows it to you, he gets 5 M&Ms, but if you have to tell him to go, then he gets 3. Or something like that. That sort of worked for us, but the real kicker was the preschool reward. Maybe there's some Big Boy activity you can use as an incentive instead of preschool, since you're homeschooling?
How about one of those musical potties that plays music when the kid does the deed?
I was lucky, one son trained himself in a week or so. And, the other one did really good during the day, again in his own time, but not so good at night.
I'm not sure how I came across your blog but am really enjoying it!
I just potty-trained my 2-year old and wanted to offer a little help. I used a combination of M&M's (the mini ones in the tubes so I didn't feel so guilty about giving him the "C" word), the book "Everyone Poops" and lastly I implanted this idea into his skull-full of mush. I told him that toilets need to be fed just like everything else does and that pottys eat poop and pee. So he needed to feed the potty to make it happy. A grotesque visual but it's worked miracles! Also buying him real "big boy" underwear seemed to get him into the groove. Best of luck!
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