To be appalled that parents need to be supported by government to potty train their child

There are still many children's centres doing the same work as surestart. Although the labour council where I work just shut a chunk of them unfortunately.

And the issues with toilet training late are a relatively new thing, 30 years ago there were very few children's centres but average age of toilet training was much earlier, so I don't think the issue can be linked.

Disposable nappies have been around for years. The situation with the number of children not being trained when they start school has increased in the last ten, five years?

Which is great in many ways but not so much if you have a child with physical disabilities or developmental delays who were denied access to education.

I think its the lack of support overall. When my DD age 3 was struggling to potty train, I got support and advice from my health visitor who at age 3 I still had regular contact with.

Family's often live further away from each other, grandparents still in full-time work. Both parents working full-time. Some skills are not passed down. I see a big differents in support, or lack.of it depending on family dynamics.

Parents have been told to wait until children are 'ready'. Trouble is what does that even mean? Modern nappies mean children learn to ignore their body's signals and there is no incentive to be clean and dry. Our local authority recommends Eric 123 potty approach and I think it's really good. Being 'ready' isn't part of it!

Yes it is small proportion. I could have probably taken two weeks max though. But my hand was forced by my job and I’m sure others would be in the same situation.

That being said, whether I took three days or two weeks or I was a sahm, potty training is still exhausting and stressful.

Would love to understand how you found the experience of potty training a child? Not a dig, just curious.

Um yes it’s terrible

and very fucking lazy.

Noone has to have children. If they can’t be bothered or don’t have time to parent properly then they shouldn’t have them.

My Ds grew up in Germany and the kindergarten would not take children who were not potty trained.

I have a friend who is a retired nurse, and she's adamant that disposable nappies are to blame. Changing disposable nappies is a faff, but I should imagine that it's much worse if you're using the old terry-towelling nappies, even with liners.

At least disposable nappies don't require you to wash them.

table manners seemed to have lapsed when you see families scrolling though their phones when out for a meal. We need to model the behaviour we expect from children.
when I was a parent reader at school I often had lunch with the children and on my table they were expected to say please and thank you, not get down without asking and use cutlery. I helped them to cut up food and encouraged appropriate behaviour. (Not a uk school)

Yes both of ours were in nursery and the nursery was so helpful with potty training. We had a really great nursery, staff were great. Plus I think there’s a social element in the sense that hardly any of the children were in nappies once they moved into the pre school room, so even though I’m sure nothing was ever said, a child would notice all their friends were going to the loo while they were still being changed.

I see on here time and time again 'I don't think my 3/4 year old is ready' to potty train. And the answers are always along the lines of 'he'll do it when he's ready, you're the Mum, you'll know'
FFS get the children out of nappies by 3, into pants, if they wet, they wet.
Mine couldn't go to playgroup unless they were potty trained. My God did every parent ensure their children were potty trained just to get a break. Few parents had their children in nursery care so the options were potty train your children or keep them at home until school age

The only thing that I can think of is that some parents became helicopter parents as their children reached adulthood and those adults then failed to become self-sufficient, hence their belief that they shouldn't have to engage with the 'boring' side of parenting when their time came.

It's the increased isolation of society. All we do is come home and stare at screens. All of us. Look at us now on Mumsnet 😂
In the last people actually went home had a cup of tea and. Anatger then some people would spend half the evenings nattering on the phone to someone else)actually speaking to their children face to face.
In addition to how tech dominates our life, it has also enabled us to feel we can move and live far away from our support networks. So people will move away from family for better rotation work/cheaper housing, eaving behind social networks that would have supported them through struggles.

@MellowSubmarine me too....i used to be friendly with a guy at work who had a kid....but omg i did judge him and his family when he told me that for the babies first birthday they bought him a bottle of coke to drink and he said it was a family 'tradition'...i mean what the hell, get the baby some teeth and then rot them all out with acid and sugar

I really don't think it's down to class (if that's what you mean by 'us' and 'them' - I might have misunderstood).

I was brought up in a coalmining town and attended primary school in the '60s/'70s. We had only one pupil in our class all the way through primary who still messed himself at times.

So far as the business of table manners etc is concerned, I was berated on another thread for using the example of parents within my own family who decided to leave teaching manners to their child's private nursery and primary school. Apparently, I didn't understand the pressures that the mother might be under.

This puzzled me, since I had a good understanding of the mother's work pressures, but I'd stated that the father was the stay-at-home parent and he wasn't juggling work commitments with parenting.

The example that I'd given of poor parenting was that the parents had allowed the child to eat sweets at the dinner table, resulting in the child choking while we were out. (An entire creme egg had been shoved into the mouth. Fortunately, the child managed to cough it out.)

It’s another government scheme pushed onto schools to help address poor dental hygiene in children. At least if they’re brushing in school 5 days a week, that’s better than nothing is the thinking behind it.
But I’m teaching children who already have the top row of teeth rotted and black from going to bed with a bottle still (at 4 & 5 years old!) so not sure how much difference it could possibly be making.
I feel so sorry for and angry on the behalf of these children, as none of this is their fault and we do our very best to help them achieve these basic life skills. But when I look back over my 20+ years of teaching, the fact remains that more of my time is now spent on what I would call ‘basic parenting skills’ than education.

Yes, it's changed quite recently as they've realised what problems the 'readiness' argument has caused.

The problem these days is that there is so much information out there and much of this is conflicting. Authoritative parenting or gentle? Adult or child led? Elimination communication at 8 months or wait til they write you a letter to say they're ready? No more nappies and keep going or stop and try again?

If there was one quick, simple, failsafe way to potty train every child then there wouldn't be a problem would there?

A large part of it is the tiny number of HV compared with dc on their caseload, so they only get time to attend Child Protection Conferences and very little else.

There used to be regular clinics and weigh ins, and classes and groups and the HVs (or midwives if you are going back to the 60s / Call the Midwife era) would be aware of who they hadn't seen, and would have the capacity to follow up with those families. There would also be some liaison between schools and other services and quiet conversations about worries could be shared and followed up much more easily.

Sure Start did a lot to redress the balance, but then of course the Tories slashed the funding for what was a tremendous thing to counter some of these difficulties.

I was busy. Me and husband worked full time. Both kids were potty trained and have table manners. I hate to say it but some parents today are just bloody lazy.

Maybe you’ll think this makes me sound like a judgy cow, but I actually do consider myself a pretty different parent to ones who give cans of monster to a young child! There was a woman I used to see at school drop off who had a ~2 yr old in a pram and every morning that child was eating a bag of frazzles. That is just crap parenting.

I don't recall my rural supermarket selling them. And even now they are expensive. 94p for a mango Vs a banana for 12p. I find mangos unreliable too, they can be heavenly or overripe mush.

When I was a kid we had apples, pears, bananas, and when in season mandarins, strawberries, redcurrants and plums. Cherries were a once a year treat in summer because they were so expensive.

I think people are too 'busy' with themselves, hair, nails, dating, instagram, tiktok to do something as mundane as teach your child to pee in a toilet