Katherine Ryan reckons her eight month old is toilet trained

[WheelieBinPrincess]

Now, if I held my baby over the loo for a couple of hours for want of something better to do on a rainy Sunday, I reckon eventually he’d use it. I could then clap and proclaim I had started toilet training

AIBU to think she’s off her rocker? Apparently, putting your baby in a nappy means you are teaching them to always go in a nappy.

I know she has a nanny to deal with all this as well, who Im sure rolls her eyes at the proclamation that her baby is fully potty trained at 8mo.

Reminds me of a friend of mine who claimed her newborn learnt to use a hand signal for hunger from day 2 or 3 so she didn’t need to cry. She was apparently fluent in baby sign from two months old.

"Toilet trained" surely means being able to go to the toilet successfully without needing a nappy, or prompting or a hovering adult. A baby cannot do this, this is mummy bragging.

"Training" a baby suggests you are teaching them something or that they will learn to do x y or z. From what I've seen in the very young babies at least the baby doesn't change their behaviour, the parent changes theirs, in response to learning what the babies signals are.

@toomuchlaundry

How does this work for night time dryness, which is down to hormones?

DS was quite happy lying in his own poo after soiling his nappy when he was bed, he certainly didn’t have a problem of soiling his own bed.

Think modern disposable nappies do delay potty training, because many babies probably hate having a wet bum, and they don’t get that sensation with disposables.

We didn’t rush into potty training with DS, partly because we had a reasonably long commute to his nursery, so wanted him to be able to be able to hold on and not immediately go for a wee once he needed the loo. I assume EC isn’t much use when you are driving at 70mph with nowhere to pull over!

We used to put dc in a nappy for car journeys. We once drove 3 hours to see ILs. We took him to the toilet as soon as we got there and the nappy was bone dry.

I had to google who she is as I'd never heard of her.

Of course her child is not actually potty trained. But announcing it to the world gets her some media coverage which in turn will boost her profile and enable her career.

EC is awsome for the environment and frankly my washing basket as we cloth nappy but it’s been a part time journey for us and at 18m we are not potty trained! Though I am going to start when the weather is warmer and I think it will be an advantage. Nappies take like hundreds of years to degrade and huge amounts of resources to make so for us that was the motivation. Genuine respect to cultures still practicing EC!

@MajorCarolDanvers

I had to google who she is as I'd never heard of her.

Of course her child is not actually potty trained. But announcing it to the world gets her some media coverage which in turn will boost her profile and enable her career.

She doesn’t need it. Most people have heard of Katherine Ryan.

I was more shocked by her face. She looks nothing like herself at all.

Also to the person asking, they pay to be in papers like the Daily mail and the sun, on the sidebar. Lottie Moss and Rizzo etc do the same too, the articles are paid for by their PR people to generate interest (I used to be in charge of these at a newspaper)

Katherine is on tour at the moment and it's not sold out so these articles help, although this particular one isn't paid for by her PR team, it's just an interesting POV

@Footsanitiser

"Training" a baby suggests you are teaching them something or that they will learn to do x y or z. From what I've seen in the very young babies at least the baby doesn't change their behaviour, the parent changes theirs, in response to learning what the babies signals are.

Mine did change her behaviour, she learned to empty bladder/bowel on cue if she had anything to do. I think she learned to wait longer too, or at least wasn't trained /out/ of the wait for open air instinct so gaps naturally widened.

It's not potty training in the undress self and climb on toilet sense. It is in the don't mess your nappy sense.

"I wouldn't ask a nursery to do EC though anyway. They don't have time to pay the amount of attention required." We did and the nursery were really happy to do it as it wasn;t any extra effort, it was less effort. I didn;t insist they did it, I just asked if they would be happy to try and they did and said they prefered it! DS was 12 months when he went to nursery. He did wear nappies whch he sometimes weed in but never did a poo in them as by then he did all his poos in the loo on his Bumbo toilet seat (which sort of held him in place without needing to be held). When they changed all the babies nappies after naps or before lunch or whenever, they would just sit him on his potty seat, no problem. Easier and more pleasent for them than changing his shitty nappies.

My mother did it with me. Not having disposable nappies or a washing machine or dryer and not going out to work meant she had the motivation to do it. I also apparently gave very clear signs when I needed to go
She said I was reliably out of nappies at 9 months of age.

YABU. It’s called elimination communication. I’ve done it with both my DC. It is so much more hygienic than nappies, more comfortable for babies, helps with soothing/ burping, and they are fully toilet trained (out of nappies completely) much earlier without all the toilet “training” fuss. I don’t know why more people don’t do it!

My DS literally did one poo in a nappy after he turned 6.5 months, two weeks after I introduced the potty to him. It was when he was 9 months old and we'd gone to stay with a terminally ill family member and I believe it was because he was feeling my distress. Even when he was nearly one and we all got a norovirus infection, he did every single poo in the potty. He realised very, very, very quickly that he didn't have to soil himself and refused to. It actually took me a little longer to fully accept what he was doing when he communicated his need to use the potty to me, as it was mind-boggling that it was really what was happening but it was. It took him longer to learn not to pee in the nappy but in the spring after his first birthday, I stopped putting nappies on him and it only took wetting his clothes a couple of times for him to decide he didn't want to. By 15 months he wasn't even wetting at night.

Quite a few of my friends did the same with their children after seeing my DS and they all had pretty much the same results. In fact one of my friends introduced the potty at a few days old and her baby almost never pooed in his nappy past 2.5 months.

Read the article and it seems fair enough. Mine isn’t potty trained at 18 months but different strokes for different folks.

I have a brother who was potty trained at 9 months old. He HATED nappies, hated feeling wet or dirty and basically potty trained himself because of that. Another brother was around 6 and wet the bed until 16.
Everyone is different and I personally can’t bring myself to be bothered how old anyone’s kid is when they do something. I call it a great day if me and ds survive it to be honest without this competitiveness!

He did wear nappies whch he sometimes weed in but never did a poo in them
Ah yes, agree, that sort of not quite EC we did with childminder too, DD was similarly not pooing in nappies by the time she went at 1. I just meant not the no-nappy watch for cues aspect.

I knew someone would say something snarky about that. I have zero issue with paid childcare- I’m a nanny myself (on maternity leave) I’m simply saying she would probably not be able to do what she’s claiming if it was just on her.

Presumably, if you knew someone would say something which you would perceive as snarky, you thought about not making it about the fact she has nannies. But given you are apparently one, it’s clearly a chip you have on your shoulder about work you do with parents take credit for.

@TheWayTheLightFalls

It’s a thing in other parts of the world, as PP said. My husband was raised in the USSR. Nurseries wouldn’t take kids who weren’t toilet trained. MIL needed to work. DH and his bro were trained by 12 months, she says.

I think potty training has got later in the West through the last century hasn’t it? Now it can be really quite late, in the 70s/80s you’d expect kids to be trained by 2, I’ve been told in the 30s/40s it was more like a year or 18 months.

Does anyone else want to know what elimination communication means but is too scared to ask?

@HollowTalk

In short it's about picking up on cues that babys need to toilet and using that opportunity to place them on a potty/toilet often earlier then when a child could verbalise this or take themselves. For some people it's about knowing when the baby is likely to go eg. After meals, others it's about recognising a poo face, others build a routine themselves

It's far more common in other countries

@HollowTalk

Does anyone else want to know what elimination communication means but is too scared to ask?

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elimination_communication

@HollowTalk

Does anyone else want to know what elimination communication means but is too scared to ask?

It means carefully watching your child from day 1 for the natural and innate physical cues they give when about to go to the toilet and responding to those by placing your newborn+ on a tiny potty and simultaneously teaching them that when they need to go, they signal.

It teaches babies to wait for a potty much earlier than if they get used to going to the toilet in a nappy. It also teaches them to recognise the signs they need the loo earlier. It's practiced in many cultures but seems very odd to the western parent.

Personally I didn't have time or mental energy for it, but I get why people do.

I did this with my child from 8 months and all poops were on the potty from that age, bar a few 'accidents' (in nappies - still used those of course). It was brilliant and I think really helped Dc decide they were potty trained before they turned 2. Also no more pooey nappies to deal with, winner!

The tabloids seem to be obsessed with taking elimination communication stories and pretending the parents claim to have 'potty trained' their baby. It's not the case but it makes good 'braggy parent' clickbait. Don't fall for it, OP.

I doubt any parent who understands elimination communication would call it potty training. I haven't done it myself but I've got friends who have, from birth, and it is really isn't training, more a case of responding to the baby's signals, noticing the patterns (eg weeing after a nap), and possibly managing to get them to respond to a familiar prompt or situation.

As many others have pointed out, this sort of thing happens across the world and across time, anywhere nappies aren't as cheap and convenient as they are here. We do teach our children to sit in their own pee and poo. That's not how most of the world does it.

also, we all learn our newborns' physical cues - most of us can recognise when our own baby is tired or hungry because those are things we know we need to respond to in order to make the baby comfortable and our lives easier. We don't look for wee/poo cues because we don't need to - but they are there. Most of us would recognise the poo face, we just don't do anything about it.