This is actually becoming a bit popular in the US, mostly with attachment-parenting folks. It’s called Elimination Communication (EC) and does involve tracking their habits, holding children over the toilet, and hissing (going pssspssspss) to communicate that it’s time to go.
Dangerosa makes a great point about consistency of care. The caretakers I heard discussing potty training when I was a kid were both homemakers, and while I know that’s not a sit-on-your-ass-all-day job, it’s easier to create a schedule and have consistent reinforcement of the behavior.
The current friends with children that I’m basing my more recent observations on are all either 2-income families or divorced families, so in most cases there’s the daycare issue, but also what Daddy does to reinforce potty training is not the same as what Mommy does.
I was born in January '54, my sister in May '55, and my brother in August '56. My mother swears she never had 2 kids in diapers at the same time. Naturally, this was pre-disposables.
I honestly don’t recall my daughter’s training because, sadly, I had to work full-time so her daycare took care of most of it. I’m guessing she was around 2 or so. I do know that I knew where every single bathroom in the mall was located so I could get her into one in very short order. (We did a lot of mall-walking - it was cheap entertainment.)
Definitely not in your mother’s generation, but I agree with my (and likely your) mother’s approach. As I mentioned, for the last few (5-6) months, I have been gently teaching my daughter to make time for the toilet, by putting her on the potty when she wakes up and before she goes to bed, just for 15-20 seconds each time. No negative reinforcement if she didn’t do anything, just lots of cheering and support if she did a wee-wee. Otherwise, I put no pressure on her to use the potty, although it was always in view (one upstairs in her bathroom, one downstairs in the loungeroom, next to the bathroom). Combine that with an “open door” toilet policy so she could watch Mummy do wee-wee, and she started to really understand. We then had a couple of “nudist” days, when she would run around with no nappy on, and we had a few accidents the first few times, but this last Friday she just decided enough was enough and only wants a nappy now to do poo-poo.
I was toilet trained at around 18-20 months… I went to a daycare/preschool where the kids, after one year, were toilet trained. And I think part of it was cold turkey… As in, while I was at that place, I had no diapers. I did use diapers at home, and my parents were not so strict, from what they say (obviously, I don’t remember).
Apparently, because of the abrupt change, I wouldn’t soil my panties, but then neither would I go to the toilet (at the place, they made sure toilets were within reach for us little tykes). So I got constipated… eventually recovered, and I don’t think there were any more real issues after that. I do remeber being 3, 4, 5 and completely toilet trained.
I just want to add that kids who are potty trained at 15 months (or whatever) aren’t actually potty trained. Their parents are training themselves to know the child’s elimination patterns, and acting accordingly. In reality, a child under 18 months does not have a completely mylinated spinal cord, and is physically unable to control their bowel and bladder.
That was my thought, too. I know I’ve read about that elimination control, with the parents holding their kids over the toilet, but it seems more like the kid is training you than the other way around.
Yeah, similar stuff in my family. I was born in July '53, my brother in November '54 and my sis in May of '58. My mom told us that when she found out she was expecting my brother they immediately began potty training me. She says I was trained by the time I was a year old. Of course, this really means my parents were trained and knew my habits and managed to get my ass over a toilet at the right time. But hey, fewer diapers to change, wash, dry (on a clothes line in a VERY humid climate) and fold.
Quite frankly I believe this is just something diaper companies put out there to sell more Pampers. Obviously there are accidents but my parents (I’m guessing I’m one of the very few on this Board who actually have a RL point of reference for 3rd world practices) insist that a goodly portion of the time the parent makes the sound and the child will associate it with a requirement to pee/poop. You can teach babies to sign pre-verbalisation but you can’t get them to pee on command with enough training?
Well, like Small Hen, I thought that it was physically impossible for this to happen. Like, kids can move their hands around before they can talk but I thought at some point (like before a year) they can’t control their sphincter/bladder to that degree.
I still can’t believe I actually clicked this thread and read the OP… but here goes:
4 years old and using diapers? Seriously? Unless the kid is retarded, yes, I find that gross.
(Representing Sweden)
Unless the diaper companies are bribing my pediatric nursing textbook, then it’s true. Mylination of the spinal cord is not complete until at least 18 months. Until the spinal cord is mylinated, the baby will not have bowel and bladder control. I’m not sure if the the hissing=peeing thing desputes that, exactly, but my point is that it’s the parents who are trained, not the baby.
Stoneburg, even in the US, four is pretty extreme. I’ve known one four year old in my life who wasn’t at least fairly well potty trained, and I’ve known quite a few four year olds.
I think my kids were pretty average for the U.S. Their pre-school accepted kids who were 2 years old if they were potty trained. (The facility was in a church and they didn’t have the plumbing required to get certified for diapered kids.) The two-year-old class was always very small and consisted entirely of girls. However, my boy add girl were both entirely ready to enter preschool at 3, and we didn’t pressure them much. They just decided when they were ready.
My brother and I (he in the early 70s, me in the early 80s) were both potty trained before our first year was up by our Indian parents. He was born there, but I was born in Britain.
Since the thread has evolved into more of a share-your-potty-training stories, I’ll add in ours.
First though things really seem to vary from family to family. Since our baby learned to sign the word for potty amongst her other signs (I’d say she was about one and a half when she added this one to her lexicon) she was able to make the connection early on and would usually signal after she had just gone –in the didie of course.
We bought her a little potty and she began sitting on that and the few, inconsistent times she actually used it were cause for great celebration in the household. Now baby equates using potty = happy parents. Star date: two months shy of second birthday.
Next step was baby signing she had to go and saying ‘potty, potty’ which resulted in a dash to the bathroom and occasional (plenty of) false alarms.
By age two, baby was completely potty trained, well ahead of most of her peers –and no, I’m not making this post simply for bragging purposes- and with the increasingly rare accidents, she is 100% potty trained prior to age 2.5.
Her cousin by point of comparison took a looooong time to get the hang of things. Such that he was almost ready to make a straight shot from Pampers to Depends (American brand of adult diapers for you non-Yanks).
I don’t have as much knowledge as anu-lala, nor as much contact with the folks to ask. But my aunt raised me from birth to age 4, and I was potty-trained within the first year, by the hissing method. I was born in India and spent my first four years there, and kids do run around a lot with just a shirt…so did I, or just in a simple little underwear, and you don’t want to have to be washing that by hand all of the time!
But how are the parents trained if they make the kid pee and poop on command using verbal signals and commands? I don’t think the fact that they noted down that the likelihood increases based on a certain set of circumstances means the kid trained them. The fact that they feel comfortable not keeping them swaddled after a certain age implies that they have a reasonable certainty that the kid isn’t going to randomly crap its pants.
F*ck, I responded politely to a whole bunch of questions about whether or not Indian people live in a cesspool of faeces but question the need to strap a toilet on to a kid’s ass till it’s six and people sure get huffy.
I wonder if there have been studies done on the development of spinal cord mylinization in countries where the prevailing practice is to train elimination on command–it wouldn’t seem THAT out of the ordinary to me that spinal neural development can be accelerated by training.
I have friends, their daughter is going to turn three in a few days, she is not potty trained. This kid speaks coherently and has some math and reading skills. She seems pretty intelligent to me. She also shits herself and laughs when others discover what she’s done.
She has the cognitive and verbal skill to explain that she likes diapers and that she will just keep wearing them thank you very much. She always shits herself when we go out to eat. She will pee on the go, even during naked time.
I used to like this kid but her joy in her own excrement disgusts me. On an entirely related note, she is a brat. Her parents’ discipline is comprised of so much new-age bullshit. The little brat won’t say ‘thank you’ or ‘please’ and she whines and screams when things don’t go her way.
The bloody brilliant thing about the whole situation is that her daycare handlers report that she is polite, well-behaved, and potty trained. Her parents’ reaction to these pronouncements? The daycare people are lying! Seriously, they think that the daycare people are bullshitting them and…apparently they think their spawn is a little asshole 24/7.
They never tell her what to do. “Would you like to put your shoes on now? If you put your shoes on now Mommy and Daddy will take you to Wendy’s, you’d like that!”
It sickens me so much that I have stopped visiting these people. The potty training and the discipline are inextricably linked. These people are utterly failing as parents. There is absolutely no reason that a person should be able to remember their potty training. It absolutely should NOT take two years to potty train a child. I’m 24 and no one I know was allowed to defecate on themselves that long, we were all trained to use the bathroom properly after 1 year but prior to 2 years of age.
You can call it Elimination Communication if you want, I would call it responsible, logical parenting. If the spinal cord factoid is true, is there any reason a kid should shit itself past 18mos? If a parent began training prior to 18mos, by the time that marker rolled around, the kid would have it down pat. Personally, 18mos is the upper limit I’ve heard from most parents. Most folks say 14mos, my mom says I was trained at 16mos, I guess I was a slack-ass.
In any case, what does it say about us as a society that we are willing to let our offspring run around covered in their own shit when it’s demonstrably possible to train them out of such a disgusting habit?
Uh, has anyone said this?