First, let me proclaim my ignorance, here: I don’t have children, probably never will, and have never so much as changed a diaper, much less tried to potty train a person. So I know nothing about this process.
But I keep reading about how Americans wait longer than other cultures to potty train their kids.In this thread, anu-la1979 says:
If this is true, why? Wouldn’t you want your kids using the toilet as soon as humanly possible? Aren’t diapers a pain (and expensive)? Enlighten me.
Aussie here. Mostly we started toilet training at about 2 years and generally successfully completed within three or so months. If started earlier than two years the length of time required to complete the course increased so that the successful completion end point was the same as starting after second birthday.
I don’t know about waiting 'til three or four years. I don’t think anyone does that. Changing nappies after two years of age would get really old.
American here. I’ve changed a lot of diapers from the age of about 7 on (huge family) and I recall a conversation when I was still young (so late 80s) about how girls potty-train faster than boys- sometimes it takes boys until they’re 2.5.
That said, a lot of my friends that have kids didn’t begin potty training until well past the second birthday, and one of my friends’ sons was about 3.5 before he was in “big boy pants” regularly, although accidents still happened. Another child, a girl, is about 2.5 and her parents just bought her a potty chair, but haven’t begun to potty train yet.
I seem to recall something here on the Dope that blamed the recent trend in delaying potty training with the increased absorbency of disposable diapers. Seems that the kids aren’t uncomfortable sitting in pissy pants so there’s less incentive to stop pissing their pants.
I’ve never heard of a parent “letting” their child shit their pants till they were four. Most people start way earlier than four…right?
Well, the boy mentioned above didn’t start potty training in earnest until well after his third birthday, and since there were still accidents fairly often until he was about 4, I’d say that “letting their child shit their pants till they were 4” isn’t totally out of left field.
However, a lot of those “accidents” weren’t accidents. His parents warned me that if I put him in time out for misbehavior, he’d likely shit his pants out of spite. And he totally did.
They start “when the kid feels ready” but it’s a pretty low pressure environment these days. I’ve seen it steadily climbing from 2-ish to beyond 3.
Australian here. My daughter is 25 months old and has been potty training for about 5 months (mainly me putting her on the potty first thing in the morning and last thing before bedtime), but only in earnest for the last month. She still won’t do poo-poo in the toilet, but now absolutely refuses to do wee-wee in her nappy. I imagine it will be a while longer before she’s night-trained. Small steps, but no way will she be still in nappies when she’s 4! Ewwwww!
But I don’t think that’s really letting him. If the kid is shitting their pants, just short of forcing them to live on the toilet, what else can the parents do?
Another Australian here. None of my friends started potty training until their children were around 3, and my cousin’s daughter started kindergarten in nappies (diapers), so she was 4+ (my cousin is a nasty, useless piece of work so I would credit that to laziness, ineptitude and being a disgraceful, worthless human being and not because of principles or new agey touchy-feelgood theories of child rearing).
I’ve noticed my mother’s generation seem to think you potty train around 2+, but my generation seem to think anything under 3 is too young (generalizing here - Dottygumdrop is clearly not in my mother’s generation and doesn’t seem to think 2 is too young). I plan to start potty training my daughter around 2ish, depending on how ready she seems. 3 seems late to me.
Spaniard here; the Nephew started kindergarten shortly before turning 2, so that’s the time he started potty training. He still has pee accidents (mostly because he’s concentrated on something else and by the time he notices he needs to go, it’s too late), but then, his Dad used to pee the bed until he was in double figures…
From the US here. My daughter was trained at about 2.5 years, my son at 3.5. But that was fully trained, weeks and weeks with no accidents, don’t have to wake 'em up at night for a pee. I started training each shortly before their 2nd birthday. The girl learned faster, clearly.
It is not common at all for an American kid to wear diapers until they’re 4. Girls seem to be frequently out by 2.5, and it’s usually a hot topic if a boy isn’t out much past 3.
No, I agree that when he was shitting his pants out of spite, his parents weren’t letting him do that. What I was trying to say was that since some parents have delayed potty training quite a bit, so that some children aren’t completely accident free until they’re nearly 4, that the statement “letting them shit their pants until they’re 4” is not a huge exaggeration.
That quote confused me, too! I was going to ask what Indian parents do differently.
I don’t know too many people with kids, but the one person I know whose kid “shits his pants till he’s four” is an unusually bright, stubborn kid who happily changes his own diapers but won’t use the toilet for that reason (he does pee in it, however). His mother has gone from frantic to resigned. I don’t think that American culture particularly encourages late toilet training, but the convenience of pull-ups and disposable diapers might make this kind of thing possible. I wonder if you just left a 3.5-year-old child in cloth diapers that leaked if he wouldn’t make a different decision, that using the toilet was a better option!
My son was potty trained around the time of his third birthday. My daughter is now two and we are currently working on learning to go BEFORE the diaper is wet. My son still sleeps in a pull up; even if I get him up in the middle of the night to pee, he tends to wet the bed when he is asleep. I’m not too worried about it since both my husband and my brother had issues with that til they were older – I figure it’s a “runs in the family” sort of thing.
I think it’s bollocks, personally (the rationale, I mean, not necessarily kids training later). Reason: oldest child barely had a sniff of a disposable - it was old-fashioned cloth all the way. Didn’t stop her not being fully potty trained till 2 months shy of her 4th birthday, and that was NOT for want of trying, believe me.
Myself, I think there may a difference in definition. You could call a kid “potty-trained” if they were able to go on the potty - well, yeah, my kids could do that before they were 2 but big hairy deal if they weren’t willing to hold on for it or make any indication that they needed to go, or had gone. Pre- disposables/plastic pants it was probably more of a viable option to simply march the kid to the potty every 50 minutes all day (and yes, at 2 it was every 50 minutes that was needed) if the alternative was “changing a nappy every 50 minutes”, but that’s not to say the kids themselves were doing anything very much different.
Anyway, we don’t seem to have any response from non-nappy-wearing cultures yet, which is really what the question is aiming for, I think. I don’t think there’s any appreciable difference between US/Canada/Europe/AU/NZ approaches, but I do hear of cultures (it seems, mainly in HOT places where a bare butt is a viable alternative) where the aim is just to catch the wee/poo until the kid is old enough to crawl/walk to the appropriate place. I would imagine that that would lead to earlier toilet training … also that you’d be dealing with an awful lot of faeces in unexpected places before you got to that point.
I work for a company that makes disposable diapers. Because we wanted to go global with disposable diapers, we extensively studied other cultures.
They do, indeed, begin potty training very early, especially in poorer countries. Allowing a child to soil their clothing is very messy, not to mention expensive and time consuming when you have to launder clothes all the time. So the earlier the child is potty trained, the better for everyone. By using a combination of negative reinforcement (showing displeasure when they peed/pooped) and positive reinforcement (praising them when they did their business while being held above a latrine), they are potty trained very early (6 to 15 months, IIRC).
My great grandmother is a Cherokee Indian. She reportedly had my cousin potty trained by 8 months using similar techniques.
To the OP:
I asked about the diaper culture of India pre-opening of the economy (this would be the 70s, when I was born). They admit that things might have changed now that there is more access to things like disposable diapers, etc.
Disposable diapers were hard to come by outside of major cities. I was born/my parents lived in a company town-basically a settlement centred around a major corporation (my dad is a scientist).
I only have a sister. They say it’s a little harder with boys but they’re still trained, on average, much faster than here. Apparently the trend is to aim for fully potty trained by 1 year for girls and between 1 and 1.5 for boys.
We were trained to pee on command apparently by 6 months old. I swear they claim that they “hiss” at little babies to get them to associate that hiss with urination (they track child’s urination habits over the first six months) and within 50 tries the baby urinates on command.
My father looked at me like I was crazy when I asked about pooping. “The same way, you fool” was his answer. Apparently not a hiss-but you don’t wait until they have to go-you take them before and repeat admonition and praise over and over again.
They did admit they had a huge advantage-which is that typically you’ll have a grandparent or family member hanging around.
Incidentally, I cannot remember my parents ever laying a hand on us but my father used the word “discipline” so I would not have put it passed my mother to reinforce negative behaviour with pinches or something. I guess they’re pretty serious about this stuff.
Also-from when I remember going to India as a little kid-after a certain period a lot of people don’t even diaper their kids, they’re basically running around bottomsless.
I also think the fact is that people see small children as completely different creatures in foreign countries and basically train them to limit impulses and behaviours that people in other countries see as “natural” and do not work on limiting. For instance, looking at pictures of myself from that age (I lived in India till I was 2), I am covered in gold jewellry. Earrings, a necklace, bracelets (gold and black rubber), anklets and a silver belly chain. I know about the belly chain because I didn’t wear clothes about 80% of the time (I was born in South India). I remember mentioning this to someone and they were all “oh, well I would have pulled all of that off if it were me covered in that much jewellry as a baby, I can’t imagine covering a baby that young in so much jewellry, real at that.” To which I sort of internally rolled my eyes because no-you wouldn’t have because everytime you tried you would have received negative attention till you stopped. Otherwise there would be a shitload more ripped earlobes in India and gold and silver tossed everywhere than there is.
I also want to add that I don’t really have a “this is better than that” attitude here-I see myself as completely American and I can’t imagine bedecking my child in that much gold, I’m just trying to explain how people say “that’s impossible” when faced with practices from the 3rd world-except…people in those countries go to enormous amounts of effort to make that practice possible because that’s their culture.
And generally when they do there are other issues - my brother in law’s niece had a medical issue that required surgery, she didn’t have the surgery until after 4. Or there are personality issues, or developmental issues, or yes, in some cases, parent issues.
I think for a lot of late trainers, consistency of care is a problem. For kids who spend hours every day in daycare, and then hours at home, there isn’t a consistent method for learning between places. Daycares are often too busy to tailor training to individual styles and rhythms.