Interesting article in the Daily Mail "How children are still wearing nappies to SCHOOL"

[Jane99Thomas]

Disposable nappies are partly to blame:

The key to potty training is for the child to associate the sensation of needing to go to the toilet with the result this produces.

But nappy technology is so advanced that the fabric in contact with the skin simply wicks away any dampness or discomfort, and the child obliviously carries on with his or her activities.

I am hoping that potty training will be easier to deal with in cloth.

can you link to article?

www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-1026958/Absolutely-potty-How-children-wearing-nappies-SCHO OL--dire-risks-health.html

Is it likely that it's due to disposables? Given that the vast majority of children wear disposables, and the vast majority are trained by the time they start school?

But if you take the child out of the nappy and put them in nothing or pants they pretty quickly cotton on IME - DS was trained at 2.2 and DD at 2 and DD is not even at school yet but we seem light years away from nappies (partly because DD was dry at night quickly also). Now that is quite a lot of smuggery from me, but it is true that they can still be trained out of disposables.

Jeez louise, isn't there anything the Daily Mail can't turn into a scare story?

HOw many of those children at school have SN? The article doesn't state that all of those wearing nappies to school are NT (which tends to mean they haven't distinguished between the two to make them look higher).

Attitudes to child rearing have changed alongside the shift to disposible nappies - many parents prefer to wait until the child is ready rather than forcing them at a young age and this age tends to change.

We work longer hours (mostly due to economic pressures) and fewer children have a parent at home to train them and this results in the need for nurseries/childminders etc to take a role. What do you do if they dont?

I think a) the problem is overstated and b) it is not solely down to 'laziness of parents'.

Yes my view is coloured by the fact my 3.8 yrold has only just started potty training in last couple of weeks. We were told not to train until we had sorted his constipation (by paed).

Terry-toweling nappies may well have sped up that process! Both the unpleasant sensation of being wet and cold and the chore of having to soak and wash the damn things meant, I think (have no stats to back this up), that many of us were toilet trained at an earlier age.

Saying that, I have friends who dutifully started potty training when dcs 2yrs and it dragged out for over 12m, whilst ds1 was that bit older &, to our surprise, success in 9 days. DD is now at a similar age but not quite showing the same readiness, will take our cue from her.

Not including those with SN, then yes imo children should not be wearing nappies when they start school - not very nice for them or their teacher I would think.

Some 2yos can be reliably trained though. Honestly at 2.1 DD made it all the way from Yorkshire to France without any accidents or having to stop on the hard shoulder. And was dry at night although I didn't dare to take her out of nighttime nappies because we were not at home. Obviously if there are special needs or a medical issue (eg the constipation) that is different.

i think it's better to wait till the kid is ready thereselves be that 2 or 6 and it not traumitise them

SN apart, my experience is that disposables do make training harder. My boys were in terries (all there was in the 70's!) and they were clean and dry by 2yrs 3mths, without any great difficulty. My dd's were in disposables and they were both nightmares to train, which wasn't achieved properly until they were nearer three. When my boys were small, again SN excepted, you never saw a child of three in nappies.

I think disposables probably make parents more laid back about potty training.

all my DC have been in disposables

DS1 - trained at 2.11 - but took well over a month to get any sort of "reliability". It was over 2 months before I could really say he was "trained" - he really wasn't ready but I felt I "had" to train him then as I knew that DS2 would be arriving not long after DS1's 3rd birthday and I didn't know when I'd get time to do it on my own. He's 7.8 now and still wets the bed every night though.

DS2 - trained in just a few days at about 2.6, dry at night (of his own accord) at 3.6.

DS3 - only 13 months so too early to say.

Not really sure that using disposables has made any real different to them. I could probably have got DS2 dry earlier had I tried, it may have taken a few weeks rather than the few days it took when he was 2 1/2yrs - but I didn't really see the point (especially not with the problems I had with DS1)

SIL's 2 DD's by contrast (also using disposable nappies) totally different.

her DD1 - dry during the day at just over 2, dry at night just before her 3rd birthday

Her DD2, dry both day and night at 22 months!!!

Look at this page

haha - train at 18 months, god if it took my DS2 over 2 months to become even vaguely reliable at 3yrs old I would have taken me 6 months to do him at 18 moths - he'd only just learned to walk at that age.

I'm sure there are some mums who keep their children in nappies longer, because they want to prolong the baby stage with their youngest/final child. Or are afraid their child will hate them if they try to impose any kind of training or discipline. Or find that interrupting their gossip to their friends to take a child to the loo a nuisance. Or think that the child will train themselves eventually without any parental effort. (I've witnessed all these over the years)

Back in the old cloth nappy days, it was usual for even little babies to be held on potties on the parents lap at known poo times, and in between changes. Potties were a part of a baby's life, not suddenly produced when a child became 2. So maybe regular potting combined with nappies that allow a sensation of wetness are the way forward.

"So maybe regular potting combined with nappies that allow a sensation of wetness are the way forward".

Regular potting sounds like an interesting theory.

Which compost do you recommend?

I don't think disposables are to blame my ds was out of nappies at 20 months day and night he ued disposables.

Riven do they really say 'normal' kids?

I think

a) it's definitely more unpleasant for a child to be wet in a reusable
b) reusables are (only slightly) more hassle so mums probably keener to stop using them
c) citing kids who were potty trained out of disposables early doesn't disprove that disposables on average raise potty training age.

My DD1 is 2.2 and was in reusables up to about 1 when we switched due to nursery issues. We have been gently trying to potty train since 18mo and she's only now showing some signs of getting it. (Amazing what chocolate buttons can do.)

I think that maybe children who are likely to be late toilet trainers anyway maybe exacerbated by the stay dry nature of disposables, and stay in nappies longer when maybe cloth would have helped them to get the idea earlier. However I am sure there has always been a bit more variance in the past that people don't like to admit to, I know in my family I was in cloth and very late to potty train about 4, whereas my brother in the same nappies was clean and dry day and night at 18months. My sister was somewhere in between.

Scuff, hahahaha!!!!! urine is an excellent accelerator for compost making, though! Perhaps we could dispense with nappies and stand them in pots like Little Weed in Bill and Ben, wee trickling down their legs.

I am horrified by the nastyness of this article. Lots of parents are tearing their hair trying to train older toddlers and lazyness doesn't come into it. I would like to know how many school aged children are not potty trained - I bet it is a tiny minority. I wonder if the family of 3 in nappies including a 7 year old have a medical problem - surely a 7 year old would be determined to train themselves and quite capable of doing so if there wasn't a problem.

quote - 'the biggest problem is that some parents are increasingly aware that the disability discrimination law, introduced in 2005, means schools can't legally reject pupils because they are incontinent,' - right so lets keep the law a secret so that the schools can break it and later trained children can't benefit from an education. All children have to go to school at 5 anyway nappies or no nappies so that is rubbish really.

so the expert consenses is to train from 18 months - never mind tailoring training to the individual child being ready and willing. Lets all make ourselves and our children miserable trying to train them when they haven't go the language or the control to do it.

Well - I suppose that yes parents probably aren't so driven on this issue these days and do relax a bit and wait for cues from their children but I actually think that is a good thing. I read an old (70's) paediatric text book that my mum had as a medical student and it described really quite barbaric training methods (tying children to potties, using laxitives, punishing them if they didn't perform) - the book was discouraging these things but they must have been going on or it wouldn't have been mentioned. It also said that some children would not train even though the parents did everything right and they were over 3 and that this was a difficult problem (but offered no solution). So there have always been late trainers as someone else said.

I would also dispute the average age being between 3 and 4 now. Where did they get the figures? from my friends - ok a small sample - it seems to me that the majority of children train between 2nd and 3rd birthdays. All of us parents with untrained 3 year olds are so stressed out about it because it doesn't seem to be the norm.

mind you I do wonder if early 'potting' would be useful in taking away the fear of the unknown in using the potty and the toilet