Children should be potty trained by the time they start school....

[Littlepurpleprincess]

According to This Morning I am 'lazy' and 'unskilled' because DS wasn't potty trained when he started school! He was FOUR and he tried his level best. We worked with him and our health visitor for 2 years to get him potty trained.

HOW THE FUCK IS THAT LAZY?!

I am childminder and have potty trained many children. HOW IS THAT UNSKILLED?

I do wish people who new sod all about child development would stop commenting on other peoples parenting skills!

Any other additional need and people wouldn't dare say it's down to poor parenting on National TV!

It does not involve smacking them! I think it is more a case of being highly motivated - taking them out of nappies as previous posters have said, not thinking that pull-ups are the same as nappies, having a bit of mess and inconvenience and in my case offering lots of bribery to the dcs. Also once they get to nursery they are taken to the toilet regularly en-masse which helps to cement the habit (in fact much of their first year is spent trailing backwards and forwards to the toilets). They soon get it - it's herd mentality.

Well, my three older children were out of nappies at/by 2.

Child 1 was still not dry in the daytime at 5. Child 2 trained herself at 15m during chicken pox as she had many spots on her bottom, then utterly regressed at 2 and was never dry again until over 6. Child 3 was still coming home wet/smelling of wee at 6.

They were dry at night at 10, 8 and 6 respectively (all at the same time when we moved to Canada bizarrely).

Needless to say I am not rushing to get DD3 (currently 2.5 and only just realising about wee coming from her) out of nappies. [mostly waiting till the summer]

I am interested in this,
DS2's class of 25 children, there were 2 children with no known special circumstances who wore day time nappies in school aged 3/4
none in reception aged 4/5
in the year below (I help in their class) there are 9 out of 24. The staff are spending a large proportion of their time changing nappies.
I will be really interested to see how many of these still need nappies next year.

NeverKnowinglyUnderstood it is beginning to sound like a cultural thing. My dcs have never been in a English school, but I can tell you that in a French school it would be completely unthinkable for members of staff to changing nappies on children of that age. Of course it could be argued that as compulsory schooling doesn't start until 7 those children who are still in nappies aren't at school or nursery at that age. That said I don't know anyone whose dcs started school (nursery) after the age of 3 at the latest and they would have had to be dry by then.

insancree - most pre schoolers wont accept children who wear nappies. iwork at a nursery and we have to take all the children the pre schools wont take until we can toiltetrain them. Its one of the stipulations of many pre schools.

I will add there re quite a large amout of parents that havent started potty training at 3/4, same as many who have never used cutlery at that age. Its relatively common

Another friend who actually is a nursery assistant in a nursery school in Brittany went like this , when I expressed surprise at the fact that all the children were trained when they started. She said they are out of nappies, yes, but in her nursery the last time I went there were only three 2 yo out of 30, the rest were 3, 4 and 5, and many certainly weren't what you might call secure when they started. She did say that they usually picked it up really quickly when they did start as they saw the others going to the loo. The fact that they all off to the loo regularly and at the same time helps.

There seems to be a discrepancy between what age seems to be educationally acceptable to be out of nappies and at what age medically there are interventions put in place. How would you know if there was anything medically wrong if nothing much happens until the magic age of 4?
Perhaps other countries are better at picking this up and then class these children as medical needs and not just those with lazy parents?

Toilet training DS1 was ineffectual at best, and then he suddenly did it all of his own accord, literally took himself off to the toilet one day and that was that. He was 3y 10m by that point. Having gone through all that with DS1, I left DS2 to his own devices and (with a teeny tiny push) similarly was pretty much instantly dry day and night. That was a month after his 4th birthday. It doesn't have to involve months of work. The nursery were happy to take him in nappies, he was only there for 2.5 hours and changing was never necessary. DD is 2.5, I'll see if she's ready over the summer but am quite happy to wait if she's not. I suspect she will be, she's very aware of her bowel movements, she's just not particularly verbal yet so it's not the best time.

FWIW, they have all had cutlery since babyhood, dress/undress themselves, put on their own coats/shoes etc, they are certainly not babied. I am at the poster who suggested that not toilet training until 4 is abuse. It was certainly much further from abuse than my elder son wetting and dirtying his pants multiple times every day for months which is something I very much regret allowing to happen.

Every single one of my dd's friends who came to play in reception and Year 1 weed on our floor at some point or other - maybe 10 or so kids in total.

I did make good use of pull ups for a while. I don't think it is abuse when they are 4 but OOH would you want your child to be in nappies. It cannot be very good for their skin.

i used to take spare pants to places.

I think its child abuse TO MAKE NO EFFORT to get a child out of nappies by four years old. There is fine line between leaving a child to their own devices and neglect. If a child is getting no where with toilet training there is nearly always special needs. It is wrong not to get the child's development evaluated if a child is struggling with toilet training.

Using the toilet is a skill and some children master it faster than others. If a child has trouble mastering a skill then you need to get help. In our area there are children's centres and a health visitor that you can phone.

Some children do get toilet training in a week where as for others it is a hard slog. It is the way that parenting is. I think that people's expectations are unreasonable. Some children will take months to learn to use the toilet whether they start at two, three or four years old.

It's like lots of other parenting issues (child not eating, not sleeping etc). It can seem to be the parents 'fault', as if the only reason their DCs don't sleep/eat/use potty, is because the parents cba.

DD eats more or less everything I give her (apart from an odd stage aged about 3yo). DS eats hardly anything (more or less from when he was born).

DD was toilet trained by 2.3yo, with a week or two of accidents, and the odd regression. DS (2.11yo) point blank refuses to try the potty/toilet, is totally unaffected by peer pressure - not interested even though all the other children in his nursery class use the toilet. He will not be persuaded AT ALL.

In the same way that you can't force feed a child, you can't force them to use a potty either. YOu can persuade and cajole, but if they're not going to do it, they're not going to do it!

My daughter had a total of 4 accidents in her first term at school (nursery class - she'd just turned 3, it was her first time in out of home care and she had a new baby brother at home) and the school threatened to have her thrown out of school as a result.

Although I have sympathy with teachers dealing with lazy parents, my experience (and that of a number of posters on this thread) is that parents aren't lazy but there are teachers in nursery who aren't prepared to deal with the occasional accident. I just think it's absolutely weird. If you don't want to deal with accidents, don't work in a nursery, surely.

It really was 4 times and I was astonished at their lack of understanding. I'm still angry about it, actually. She's in a much better school now where the teachers fully understand that these things happen on occasion. I'm taking this story about parents becoming lazier with a pinch of salt.

This kind of thread really pisses me off in a way that few other topics ever manage to. For some (many?) children it is simply not that easy. A school friend of DS's was still not dry in the day at 11. He obviously had EXTENSIVE investigations which revealed nothing wrong and was told he would grow out of it. Clearly this boy was very much at the extreme end of the normal spectrum for toilet training but still the health professionals following him could find nothing physically wrong with him. Similarly for us, my DD1 who a year after regressing had a number of tests- to rule out infection, kidney damage etc- we were told that there was nothing wrong and we should just wait and it would improve. Well, it did, but not until she was 7. If you have children who just "get" toilet-training you are lucky. It's not something you need to go rubbing the noses of people who really struggle in.

If I had a £ for every person who said to us when we were washing 15-18 pairs of pants per day + 3 sets of bedding (yeah, we did the whole not using pullups unless visiting as well), "Oh my little x was dry in a week" (as though we were somehow doing something wrong) I could have employed someone to do the washing for me.

Luckily for my children, there appears to be absolutely no link between intelligence and one's level of thickness at toilet-training.

Guess I'm an abuser then ReallyTired because apart from the odd lazy day at home when I left him nappy-less to judge his awareness, I really did make no effort at all. FWIW, the sum total of my HV's advice when I asked her about DS1 was that he would just have to learn how to do it because he was over three, due to start nursery and I had a baby on the way. As I said, one day he went and did it himself, and as a result of that I left my younger child to learn himself. It would have been far easier for me if DS2 had been dry at 2, I had nearly 2 years of 2 children in nappies, and I did wibble occasionally and wonder if I was making a mistake in letting him be, but I was sure that it was the right choice for him, and in the end I was right.

(Just to add, I wasn't trying to cast aspersions on people whose children take a while to learn, more trying to counter some of the previous posts which said that toilet training is supposed to be hard work and that people who try and avoid said hard work are lazy or bad parents. Apologies if I upset anyone, it wasn't intended :))

Gosh Reallytired, I do hope someone calls you a child abuser one day so you can feel what that's like. Did you mean to be that horrible? Or did you misword your post?

And where exactly is this help to come from then? My experience was: GP - bugger all help (urine tests for infection only); Health visitor 'sorry your child is too old, see the school nurse'; school nurse (six week wait to meet with) 'um have you tried bribery'.

Children are all different. I have two very bright children who are just very slow to get toileting. And frankly I don't see why I should shame them into it - DD has now got it, it's taken umm three and a half years. I guess if I yelled at her more often she'd be more neurotic probably have succeeded two days earlier. Perhaps I should be beating DS with a stick or something.

What a load patronising, uniformed twaddle is on this thread

I'm feeling bad for started a thread that got so heated!

It seems the outcome is that there probably are a few parent's who are lazy and unskilled, but the majority of parent's are doing their best, and if the child is not potty trained at four, there is reason (medical or otherwise).

What's obvious is that judging parent's and pointing fingers is not helpful.

Instead of everyone beating themselves or the parents with a stick, could it be possible that the rise is due to a physical/medical explanation.

I have a very mature 4 nearly 5 yr old that has had multiple accidents since starting school - luckily they have only been small amounts of wee and the easy dry pinafores are very forgiving so only once has she had to change! But everyday of the first term she had the distinct whiff of old wee by home time.

I am pretty sure I have narrowed it down to an issue with food high in oxalates (e.g. nuts, spinach, beetroot, rhubarb, berries, wheat bran and wheat germ, quinoa, soya products, chocolate). Not tolerating high oxalate has it's origins in unhealthy gut flora. We should all have oxalate degrading bacteria in our gut but unfortunately they are very susceptible to broad spectrum antibiotics (something my daughter had a lot of, for ear infections when a toddler). Without them your urine is full of irritating oxalate crystals.

Anyway its just one possible factor. Society should try looking a little deeper for solutions and reasons instead of immediately questioning the moral fibre of parenting.

I can't read and run. I am a teacher and I spend time each day changing children who have accidents. I have no problem with that.

I have 26 children in my class, and only one teaching assistant. If a child wets, one of us will assist the child in changing into clean clothes (and bagging up the wet ones) whilst the other is with the remaining 25 children.

If a child soils themselves, this requires two of us- one to clean the child as best we can, and the other to witness that that we are 'touching' the child appropriately. For the child's privacy we try to do this in the toilet area. This means that the remaining 25 children simply have to 'get on' without adult support.

We have had to change many of the activities we plan to do with the children due to staffing the daily toileting 'incidents'. This week this meant no cooking (due to lack of time), shortened outdoor play provisions, missing our hall time etc.

Please don't blame the teachers in this.

I used to work at lunchtimes in reception. This was about 9 or 10 years ago. I remember I only had one child who wet herself. It was hard as I had no one to cover whilst I tried to help her etc so I understand what cloudwine is saying.

also as cloudnine says it means the other children are missing out on teaching time or other stuff. Why has this become such a problem now when it wasn't before?

If I were a teacher I would hate to have to deal with this as a norm.

I remember wetting myself at school when I was 4.

It's not exactly a new thing.

4yo have been wetting themselves since time immemorial, I'm quite sure.

This morning - yuk bag o shite

but cloudwine, this is just in the nature of caring for small children. They do sometimes have accidents - I remember them happening at my primary. Indeed my best friend remembers one recurrent issue in her class with a boy who is now a famous film star!! The bit that's new is having to have a witness but the rest of it is not new. I'm sure it's annoying but so are many things about working with small children.

And my post is about what happened to my daughter in Nursery where surely nursery teachers have to factor this in as a part of developing.