should I stop wiping my DD's bottom full stop

[Shinyshoes1]

She is 3. 8 years and is starting preschool nursery in September, I know thye won't wipe her bum for her and will encourage her to do it herself.

We still do it for her.

Should we stop altogether now to get her prepared for doing it herself all the time.

She's just been to the toilet and hasnt done it properly but where shall I draw the line

[EdithWeston]

< I wondered if this was going to be an obscure punctuation thread, along the lines of erasing an Oxford comma >

I suggest you say to her that it's time she wiped herself. You stay with her, and say you'll "just check" if she's done it all right. Then you'll find out how capable she is, can remind her to do it front to back, and work out whether and what kind of help she might need. When she's done so reliably for a couple of weeks, then you can stop checking.

[FloriaTosca]

My DS is 3.10 ..he started preschool last Jan and frequently comes home with skid marks ...We keep encouraging him to do it himself (using Kandoos) and follow up with a wipe over from us to check. I would say he gets it perfectly right about 60% of the time, we are hoping that he will gradually get the precentage higher....in the mean time for us I think it is just a matter of checking every time he gets home and awarding stars for his chart when he doesnt need changing.
I hope someone else has better ideas..I'd quite like a miracle cure for him too.

[ragged]

We just stopped a 6 week phase of 3.5yo DS wiping own bottom; even with me checking every time and daily baths he ended up with the most horrendous bum rash (crying at night & bleeding and all). It was right up the last cm of his crack, so for a while I thought he was just whinging over nothing, I didn't realise/see it until it was very very bad. Had to bend him across my knees and part the cheeks wide to see it properly.

We are back to me doing all cleaning & wiping with babywipes & sudocreme treatment, too (bless that stuff, it works!)...

Not had this problem with other DC, but not tried to get them to wipe either, before they actually were about to start school proper. So have decided to ignore the MN mantra that they should fully self-wipe the instant they are toilet trained at all, and I will continue to deal with his bottom as much as possible until he goes to school proper.

I guess preschoolers self-wiping must work in other families, but that's just about the end of my experiment with it. Am pretty sure that Kando wipes aren't actually supposed to be flushed (no matter what the packaging says), and the preschool won't supply them, either, for that reason if none other.

[plinkplonk]

I tried this with dd who is 4.5 after reading various comments on mn about how ridiculous it was to still be wiping your dc! She can do it fine when she needs to, but it turned into a conflict situation between us. So I do it and assume that she will do it more readily once she is at school (September).

Generally speaking I find the nursery/school good at getting kids to do things for themselves - mine are way more independent when they are away from me.