To think that not toilet training your child is borderline neglect?

[PithyNavyViewer]

If your kid is four and still in nappies, that’s not a “gentle parenting choice” - it’s just lazy.

Support for these stats from links given on this thread:
https://ihv.org.uk/news-and-views/voices/toilet-trouble-supporting-the-1-in-4-children-starting-school-not-toilet-trained/

https://kindredsquared.org.uk/school-readiness-survey/

I'm trying to find the page...I think that Eric said that the figure for children starting school is 25%. Shall post if I can find it.

In the meantime, I found this interesting - Eric advises not waiting for readiness.

https://eric.org.uk/potty-training/

Found it.

https://eric.org.uk/news/eric-launches-school-readiness-campaign/

I was very interested in that. Not the advice that was being given 30 years ago when we were tackling potty training. Unusually, the advice has swung back to the older approach, i.e. start before the child is 2.

@Gasp0deTheW0nderD0g
@WearyAuldWumman

I’m not nitpicking but,
My issue with the kindred report , which I have read before , including previous ones, is that it doesn’t actually mention nappies anywhere, just “toilet trained”. They also define not toilet trained as “toileting mishaps occur frequently rather than occasionally “ which is not the same as (1 in 4) children starting school in nappies or not being toilet trained at all.

I also find it interesting that the Eric charity focuses on removing the stigma and shaming out of this issue (and the various other factors they think might be at play , same as with the kindred report) and here we have pages and pages shaming and stigmatising parents and children . Starting with the thread title.

This might be part of the issue. I honestly had no idea the advice has changed, and I bet many other parents wouldn’t have either, and if they already had kids before and used the old advice successfully, they’d have no reason to look again.

If this is indeed the way to go, it should be promoted and publicised a lot more . Make sure parents actually know . Even the NHS advice isn’t updated and it does recommend waiting for readiness while mentioning various ages. A google search brings up more of the same , with the Eric website lost amongst them, and by the time parents start looking specifically for it, it’s too late.

It's mysterious that parenting advice from official sources changes so much - and that there is still so much variation across developed countries. One might have fondly imagined that developmental biology and psychology would be advanced, settled science by now and that the powers that be might have reliable sources to inform them.

After 63 years on this planet, I've come to the conclusion that psychology, psychiatry, education, child development and all other branches of knowledge that depend on understanding how the human brain works have barely scratched the surface as yet. It's still mostly unknown unknowns.

What is worrying is the utter certainty of some professional people when they start evangelising over the latest theory - they are so sure that this is the right one, and always will be, and all previous practice and guidance is now discredited. And then it isn't.

Examples that come to mind are lobotomies, reorganising major cities and many aspects of daily life around the car and making life very difficult for non-drivers, and in education innumerable fads adopted with no evidence base such as the Initial Teaching Alphabet and individual learning styles.

New parents are particularly vulnerable to this stuff as most know sod all about bringing up a child before they have one, so HCPs and parenting gurus have a receptive audience desperate to be told what to do.

[rant over]

My post was satirical.

I don't agree: I think there is a lot of settled science but that corporate and political interests prefer to ignore it, wilfully.

In particular, crucial procedural skills and healthy habit that are developed from the earliest years are now hindered/blocked by all sorts of heavily marketed consumer goods that make parents' lives easier in the moment but store up massive issues for later. It's not controversial to state that the science is settled around the benefits of breastfeeding, of weaning onto a wide variety of plants (more vegetables/pulses than fruits), of avoiding artificial perfumes and chemical additives, of preferring wood, glass and steel kitchen utensils and avoiding plastics where possible, of working to develop on gross and fine motor skills, of having conversations with children, of reading books with them every day, of going barefoot where possible, of not going everywhere by car etc etc

This is all so true. People have been sold the idea that convenience is best, and you don't have to do hard things because you're busy, so why not buy our product and make everything easier. Everyone wants a quick fix. There is no long term thinking any more.

There's too many agendas here. I've tried googling and couldn't find it but I'm sure that I remember some study claiming it's better for kids bladders to wait until 3 to train that turned out to be sponsored by a nappy company.

I agree about poor diet. I've not seen it mentioned much but I'll always tell anyone who asks for advice to make sure that their child is eating a lot of their preferred laxative type food when starting training as you don't want them constipated.

It's very hard indeed to separate out the marketing messaging from the political messaging from the science messaging. And, tbh, it becomes extraordinarily hard work to make decisions in a world chock a block full of competing agendas.

Its also worth remembering that lots of schools now have pre school class rooms often mixed with reception. At my DCs school they can start as soon as they turn 3. So if the reception teacher at my DCs school said she was changing nappies, she could be referring to 3YOs.