Maybe no one has been huffy exactly but it seems like a few people are citing spinal cord myelinization and saying that it’s impossible to toilet train prior to 18 months. I’ve googled and I cannot dispute that this is accepted medical fact.
However, this assertion flies in the face of the direct experience of many posters in this thread, entire generations of Americans, and numerous existing cultures.
If the kid can purposefully communicate that it needs to go to the bathroom, the kid is potty trained, not the parent.
That 3 year old I mentioned, her parents are definitely the ones who’ve been trained.
I think part of the problem here is that people are thinking of different definitions of “trained.” If someone tells me their kid is potty trained, I’m going to picture a child who can recognize that they need to go to the bathroom, and alert someone- in other words, a child who is doing his share of the work, too. Not that tracking a baby’s habits to the point that you know when it’s time to hold them over the toilet and hiss isn’t useful* but to me, that’d sort of be like saying a baby could feed itself because it opens its mouth when you hold a spoonful of food near its face.
*I understand that these babies are actually doing a bit more than that, but how often are the caretakers holding the baby over the toilet - is it so often that the child barely has to control its bodily functions?
Yes. When our mothers said we were all trained by two years old they were allowing for wetting the bed (or waking kid up in the middle of the night) and for periodic accidents. Also they were allowing for reminding kid to go pee on a regular basis which means keeping tabs on the signs that kid needs to pee rather than requiring kid to carry the load on that. Elimination training is also a matter of parents and kids…not training each other exactly, more like learning the other’s signals and learning to pay attention to them.
The down side of late potty training is much less than it was, what with pull ups and so on. So it isn’t surprising that kids train later. You can with sustained effort do it early; or you can with limited effort do it late. What people often do not realize is that if you wait until later you have a much less…malleable child to work with.
One of the parenting decision I made which I would do differently if I did it now was to wait to train my kids until they could essentially carry the load (as it were). All I did was to swap a lot of work for a lot of power struggle, or so it seems to me now.
It may be a reflection of how we look at parents and children and how that changes over time, but when people think of a child who is potty trained, they mean that the kid has primary responsibility for his or her using the bathroom: recognizing the need, communicating it, holding on until they can get to a toilet wherever they happen to be.
In the scenario you describe, parents and babies are each responsible but mostly the parents are. They are responsible for communication with the baby – both noticing when baby needs to go and getting baby where s/he needs to go, and regularly having baby do his/her thing whether s/he is givng signals or not. Of course the child did not train them, they learned their baby’s rhythm and encouraged the child to develop such a rhythm. It is unlikely that they would, for examle, ask or expect a 14 month old to just hold it until they can get to the other end of the mall or what have you. Parents who use elimination training know when their kids need to go in the same way I knew my kids needed to eat something: I fed them more or less on a schedule and in a fairly short time they were hungry more or less on a schedule. Then as they got older they were able to say that they were not hungry at that time and had their own input.
My son was potty trained with virtually no accidents by the time he was 17 months. I think he found the whole process very entertaining. He was in charge of the whole operation except the “paperwork” which I had to assist with for a while.
It just seems cruel to wait until kids are 2years old to begin training them. As far as the definition of training goes, folks I’ve talked to say it only takes a day or two for kids to figure it out.
I don’t think that the EC method implies these people spend a great deal of time suspending the little nippers over the toilet, if so, then no, those babies aren’t yet potty trained.
What is the appeal of putting off potty training? Those of us who were trained before we can remember don’t seem to have psychological issues. Why go through the power struggle and expense when you could have it over with quickly?
Oh, how easy being a parent is, for those who haven’t done it! And how lousy all of those struggling parents are, who have not simply figured out how damn easy it is, and gotten up off their asses and done what it takes to do everything right! It must be that they are stupid, cruel or lazy. After all, some people I talked to had no trouble at all doing it in a day or so, so it can’t be something really difficult for some, can it.
The link about EC that **dangermom **added to the thread in post #21 talks about taking the baby to the toilet every 10-20 minutes as a newborn, and slowly lengthening that to about once an hour as a six month old. This culture isn’t really structured for most people to do that kind of thing.
Yup, this is about it. That method of potty training works perfectly well, but in order to do it you need the sort of round the clock attention that generally only living in a true extended family can provide - my parents are willing to baby-sit on occasion but aren’t going to spend months living in my house and suspending the kid over a toilet every hour on the hour.
That probably explains why most Indians, when they move to (say) Canada, no longer do that kind of training, and switch to the “pampers” variety - lack of extended family/woman working outside the home makes the other kind impractical. The age moves up to around 2 or so on average, when kids have the ability & control to participate in training on their own.
I don’t know about this. My cousins have all moved here from India and none of them have children over the age of a year and a half in diapers, boy or girl. My sister grew up in Canada from the age of 2 months (we moved when I was 2) and it was the same deal for her. We have pictures of her at the age of 1 year without diapers. The only difference between me, my sister and my cousin’s kids is that they were all in disposables and I was kicking it old school in cloth, gigantic safety pins and plastic pants.
Freudian Slit:
I think it’s pretty condescending to state that people outside of the West are “trained” by their children, yes. Granted this could be a difference in how we view what being trained is-that the Western definition of potty training is that the kid must walk into the water closet fully capable of expounding upon Cicero and asking for a perfectly folded square of TP before it can be considered fully trained whereas in the non-West it’s something along the lines of a reasonable certainty that poop and peep can be both predicted and requested on demand.
Believe me, there’s no way I’m kicking it old school in terms of say…the caste system or other non-worthwhile things, but having watched every one of my relatives get their kid out of diapers by 18 months (and none of them are living in mud huts in Chicago…they’re all engineers, MBAs or doctors) and having been trained prior to the average age myself I’m certainly not going to close my eyes to the idea that maybe I don’t have to wipe my kid’s ass till it’s 10 because Huggies says so.
In certain cultures, I’m sure it’s not an option not to potty train at a younger age. My husband was trained by the time he was a year and a half old because, living in India, he had a household of servants to take him to the toilet periodically, marble floors he could pee on while people mopped up after him and diapers were simply made unavailable to him after a certain point. However, doing something different doesn’t always mean that it’s cruel or wrong.
Exactly what were these people doing that took only a day or two to train their kids? Did they have help? In many cultures, servants are common even in the middle class. What type of lifestyle did they live - was at least one parent at home all the time or did they work? Were there relatives living with them? Where did their children spend most of their time? Were diapers simply made unavailable? I’m not asking to be snarky - I’d really like to know.
My son just turned three and is only now nearly finished with potty training, so I am defensive to a certain extent. However, most pediatricians I’ve spoken with in the U.S. advocate “child-led” potty training where the kid indicates readiness then, in response, the parent provides the tools and encouragement for the kid to train. I’m not sure how much of that is the over-emphasis on self esteem that the U.S. seems to support vs. how much is developmentally-based. Regardless, both approaches are just different from each other. Making a value judgment on the parents for following the advice of their pediatricians or, in non-Western cultures, culturally-accepted norms, seems kind like jumping the gun.
The way I see it, it’s very much like co-sleeping vs. cry it out. If you have the luxury of trying both, why not base your approach on your kid and your culture rather than assume that one is inferior just because you disagree with it?
I don’t know that that’s condescending as perhaps recognizing the physical reality of the situation. You’re the one talking about strapping a toilet to the kid’s ass till it turns six/wiping a kid’s ass till age ten. You just seem really defensive about it.
Has WhyNot posted to this thread? I know she said her philosophy on training was that she didn’t want her kid to start half-assed, so to speak. Like, it’s not enough for the kid just to ask, they actually have to be willing to go all the way (pee and shit in the toilet all the time) before she toilet trains them, not just pee in it part of the time. I think she had a pretty good reason for why, as I recall.
I’ve said this before here…I occasionally go to a Mommy board and find people’s definitions of trained interesting. Although I have no doubt there are kids who train very young, there are also people who have less strict definitions of ‘trained.’
My kids were late trainers, they were day dry by 3 1/2 (both of them, for different reasons). But when I say trained, I mean that the only subsequent accidents have been related to illness. They also were almost completely independent by that age - no wiping butts and only the occasional tough button for me.
I’ve heard some Mom’s say things like “my daughter is potty trained…she only has one or two accidents a day” - in my book that is “my daughter’s potty training is coming along well.” Trained to me means you can put the kids in the car. Drive 20 minutes to the mall. Visit the mall. Use a public bathroom. Visit the mall some more. Maybe visit the bathroom again. Drive home. Not have to do laundry as a result of the trip. And this is a repeatable process - barring illness.
Or a mother said “Preschool requires my son be potty trained. He doesn’t have accidents as long as I put him on the potty every hour.” In my book, that’s really close, but no cigar on the potty trained. Preschool probably isn’t going to do scheduled breaks.
I’ve never been able to understand why potty training always turns into such a heated debate. Parents that train early are deluded / too strict / fabulously effective, and parents that train later are lazy / indulgent / tuned into the needs and abilities of their offspring.
No one gets an award for having their kids trained first, unless you count not having to change diapers as long. I’ve never heard of a kid being denied an ivy league education because they were in diapers on their third birthday.
Everybody is seeking to validate that theirs is the one best way to raise a child, be it feeding, sleep habits, potty training, or discipline. It’s a wonder humans turn into functional adults at all, what with all the people out there parenting “wrong.”
Oh, and as long as I’m back in here - except for the diaper bill (and resulting environmental impact), I’m not sure what difference it makes if a kid trains at 14 months or at four. My late trainers are not disciplinary problems in school. They bring home good report cards. They are both acceptably atheletic. Last I checked, age at potty training was not one of the application questions for Yale or a reason to keep you out of med school.
Now, granted, there are times when late training is a symptom of something else - like poor parenting. But sometimes poor parents have early trainers, and sometimes great parents have late trainers.
And I suspect this realization is what has really driven late training in the United States. If the burden of diapers isn’t excessive (cost, laundry, whatever) there is no reason to stress over it. The vast majority of kids figure it out eventually on their own - some of them do it really early - others drive you to wondering if they change diapers at Kindergarten.
Since I was the one who used the phrase, “It’s the parents who are trained,” I’ll answer this. Obviously the children are not training the parents - most 10 month old (or however old we’re talking about here) babies aren’t smart or manipulative enough to train their parents. What I meant was, it’s the parents who train themselves. They learn to recognize the kid’s scheduel. They take the kid to the potty. They make the Pavolovian noise. It requires practically no effort on the baby’s behalf - I can’t call that being potty trained. And that’s because it’s not physically possible for a baby that age to recognize the need to go, communicate that need, and hold it until they’re in the bathroom. Once their bladder is full to the point where they might recoginize a need, it lets go on it’s own.
I have no reason to doubt that’s the case - but may I ask how the parents have the time to accomplish it, if it involves taking the kid to the toilet each hour? Most people I know have other obligations and lack older relations willing to do it for them.
If you can do it, more power too you. Just don’t freak if it doesn’t turn out to be as easy as you seem to think.
To my mind, it isn’t some propaganda by Huggies that prevents toilet-training of really young babies, but the practical realities of Western life - most Western parents haven’t the time to focus on the tight scheduling required, and haven’t relations willing to do it for them.
oook…Some claimers first(couldn’t think what the opposite of disclaimers would be)
I am a middle aged Indian living in the US for 10 years now and petrified father of a six month old. Plus I have had a steady stream of moms, in-laws and other relatives through the house. And potty training is the main conversation topic every single day.
We have had great success with taking him to the bathroom when we think he is ready to go (he gets a little fussy) and he usually obliges. We just started this and are thrilled with the results. Leaving aside the question of who is training whom, it certainly means fewer diaper changes.
The idea is to read his signals and take him to the bathroom - I do see this as the parents being trained. But he sees us getting thrilled with his efforts and hopefully, this positive reinforcement would have some impact.
We are also trying out naked time for a few hours every evening - where he plays on a waterproof sheet on the floor with a simple cloth underwear kind of thing. This helps us to recognize his signals better - we can see when he goes.
Hopefully this helps in getting him out of diapers asap -
This is what I’m talking about - most people here in the West lack this sort of thing; when relations visit, their main topic of conversation is likely to be other aspects of a child’s development.
The amount of time and communial effort required for this sort of training isn’t something that most people here can easily accomplish. Hence, a preference for waiting until the child is old enough to be more of a participant.
