15 months old is too young to potty train, right?

[Rainatnight]

Our DD is 15 months and seems to have quite a lot of awareness of when she's weeing and poo-ing. If she's doing a wee, she'll point towards her downstairs and say, 'weeeeee' for example.

A couple of relatives have said that we should think about potty training her, or at least having a potty around so she can wee in it if she wants.

But I think she's really tiny still, and can't see any benefit in doing it so early. (In fact, I've heard doing it too early can put them off).

But what do you think? Am I missing anything?

Before disposable nappies were invented children were potty trained from early as washing piles of dirty nappies was a lot of work.
Disposable nappies and life style changes means children are potty trained later.
Its an old wives tale that potty training early "puts them off".
If your child is dry for at least two hours and is aware of her bodily functions then you could try potty training

Well, my MIL was making exactly the same point about old fashioned nappies. Also that they didn't feel as comfortable to the baby so they were keen to get out of them.

Hm, not sure about dry for two hours though.

If you have a quiet couple of days you could give it a go with an open mind. If she's showing signs of being ready then why not try? They're all different.

We started gentle potty training ('potty learning' I've since heard it called) when DD1 was 16mo. Initially this was just sitting her on the potty before her bath and singing songs, and praising any incidental successes. She went on to tell me occasionally that she needed the potty (we'd whip her nappy off and sit her on) and as this became more frequent we switched her to pull ups to make life a bit easier for us all (she was in cloth nappies up until then). She would have dry nappies often for over 4hrs at this point. By 21 or 22mo she asked for knickers so we went for it: it definitely wasn't the easy 'trained in a day' that you hear about for those that wait until the DC is 3+ but was totally manageable. After nearly 2yrs of cloth nappies, even several pairs of wet knickers/trousers a day was a huge reduction in washing so worth the effort for me!
DD2 is 15mo and we started sitting her on before a bath a few weeks ago. She hasn't worked out what it's for yet, but is very happy to sit on it and will often drag it into whichever room we're in to use as a seat. Being happy to sit is stage 1 complete for me

I agree with the above. It's not ridiculous to start training yet, and 50 or 60yrs ago most babies were trained by 18mo. I'd just go with a very relaxed and gentle approach: you have to really help them learn a bit at a time at this age rather than explain/reason and jump straight in like you can with a 3yo. I still think the effort is less than another 18m of nappies though!

Thanks, that's really interesting. Do you think there's any benefit to it though, rather than doing it in a short burst later? Because she can (maybe) doesn't necessarily mean that she has to, if you see what I mean.

It depends on your motivation I suppose? I followed DD1's lead but my motivation was dropping the nappy washing and not sending unnecessary nappies to landfill (plus the cost of the disposable nappies). If you are going through 4 nappies a day the difference between going into pants at 22m compared to 36m is 1700 nappies needing washing/going to landfill.