Why would you wait till 2 years old?

[JingleJangle7]

I was just cruising for tips such as when will my 14 month old be able to hold in wees for more than 1/2h (she does at some times of the day) everyone elses kids seem to be much older which I find quite wierd.

We started putting DD on the potty at 4 months because I got fed up of scraping poo off her back every morning and from 13 months she's been in towelling trainer pants even at creche. We're good with poo (mainly), I think we have a more than 50% wee in potty rate and she's dry at naps. We have a lot of accidents but we're learning as she gains control. Now what we need is for her to tell us when she needs to go.
Toddlers really did used to get trained at 12-18 months (>90% by 18 months in the 1950s) in the days of terry towelling nappies that mum had to wash. Nappies cost a forture, why do most people seem to wait so long scrapping poo of bums for years longer than they need to? I don't mean to be patronising, I'm just baffled.

havent read the whole thread but 'We started putting DD on the potty at 4 months ' - wtf??!! 4 months??

lacy...erm, then, read the thread?

Yes 4 months. Every morning she had a huge poo up her back onto her vest so I bit the bullet and tried her on a potty. I put out a large plastic mat around the potty because I was expecting a volcanic explosion but it was a almost disapointingly tame and a million times easier to clean up.

What do you lot all think that mums did in the days before disposable nappies???

Yes my mum got on to me to get started with toilet training too.

Wore terry towling nappies or other alternatives, duh. We don't live in the dark ages now, we are lucky to have disposables so we use them so what! Its none of your business what other people do, just concentrate on yourself op. I am afraid that you do sound so smug I hope that it goes tits up.

Thankfully we have left many things of the past behind. Jingle jangle if you want to live in the past, why not ditch your oven, washing machine, and hoover, why do we need them? What did other people do in the past?

I totally fail to see would anyone could possibly construe as cruelty about putting a baby on a potty. Firstly, she was able to sit and it was a commode style potty. Secondly she happily reading books, turning the pages, I sang rhymes, talked to her explaining what was going on and she was generally getting loads of undivided attention and eye-to-eye contact. Finally I don?t expect wonders and I?m consistent, I?m trying to build the toilet-release muscles-wee/poo-praise connections in a gentle way as she learns to control herself.

I?d like to say that I value my mother and grandmother?s parenting advice a lot more than some nameless so-called potty training experts (imagine having to fill that in as a job description). Do you know that they were not doing their studies in partnership with a nappy company because they?d have us incontinent all our lives if they had their way? I don?t know, I?ve not looked it up but I?m going with what my mother advises me to do and those experts and their books were certainly not around in her days.
It seems to me to be a really big ask to expect a +2 year old to change the habits of a lifetime (literally) especially since two year olds are notorious for not being interested in pleasing Mum. To try to get them to voluntarily break off their important play to go to the potty when they?ve been conditioned to go in a nappy seems to me to be challenging to say the least. I?m amazed that for some kids it does seem to work in 2 weeks or so but I?m less surprised that there are so many threads about toddlers only wanting to poo in nappies etc. I wonder what the failure rate is and how many parents decide that their tot is not really ready after all despite them ticking off all the boxes and how many times people try on average before their toddler finally manages it.

It seems to me to be a really big ask to expect a +2 year old to change the habits of a lifetime (literally) especially since two year olds are notorious for not being interested in pleasing Mum.

See, that sounds nuts to me. My two year old was delighted to please me with a wee or a poo in a potty and it clearly wasn't a big ask as the whole thing was done and dusted in less than a week (day and night, no accidents to speak of). She was not unusual among other children that we know.

You, OTOH, have a kid who only wees in the potty 50% of the time. So when s/he is finally trained at two or more, you will have cleared up literally hundreds of wees on the carpet, on the sofa, in her pants, on someone else's chair that you didn't need to clear up. What I find genuinely astonishing is why you'd bother. It's so much easier to let them wait until they are ready to be actually potty trained.

Literally everyone I know with kids tried ONCE, at over two, and literally everyone I know had the whole thing cracked in less than a month. You seem to have spent a year doing it so far and will probably have another year to go before your child is actually potty trained!

The reason why there are lots of threads about problems is because they are problems. I'm hardly likely to post a thread saying 'My DD potty trained herself in less than a week and it's all fine!', am I? Because that would be nuts.

Its not the nappy companies keeping children in nappies longer, some are just not ready till later. I do not want to spend a year cleaning up poo and wee off the floor for dd to be ready at 3 when we would have arrived at the same result if I had left her in nappies, less mess and stress I say. Of course i would have wanted my dd trained at 18 months but she was neither physcically or psychologically ready. I gave up and put her in nappies when i started to loose my rag and shout at her and was stressed. I would rather be a happy mummy with a happy toddler in nappies than an unhappy one in pants.

getting wee in a potty 50% of the time doesn't have to mean cleaning it up the other 50. Most that ec use nappies as well.

Well be prepared for it to take a looooong time.

DS1 spent a lot of time nappy free and by 14 months - just as a result of us catching the wee in a potty as he ran around in the buff - he would verbally tell us "wee wee" and do it in a potty IF he was naked. As soon as he had anything on his bottom half though it was another story. He was just not ready.

Then one day at 2.4 he kept a nappy dry all day by asking when he wanted to go. The next day he was in pants and that was that. He was ready.

I take it she is your first as surely you would just have no time for this method if you had other kids to look after.

I have twins.

With just one DD you clearly have too much time on your hands.

Bet you don't take the same approach with your 2nd

And bet you are not very popular at creche

My friend has potty trained early and she is contiualy stressed about accidents and quite house bound with it. Personally I think it has been quite a negative experience for her son but she is so very determined to do it.

I can't think of anything worse than being busy out and about all day while trying to catch baby poo. Why stress myself about loo visits contiually and have to carry endless bags of changing clothes to toddler groups and cafes? Not keen on putting pressure on my children either and would rather wait till they can tell me they need the loo. Waiting till they are older mean is toilet training will be a quicker more positive process.

she was reading books at 4 months old??

Heh, that made me laugh too, SoupDragon. Mine would have been chewing the book rather than 'reading' it. Although perhaps cardboard pages would be quite high in fibre and thus speed the poo process.

Can't resist putting my two-pennies worth in. Tried potty training my dd at 2.4 and whilst some wees ended up in the potty, far more didn't: after 2 days we decided to give it a break - had brought home 10 sets of wet clothes from nursery!!! Tried again at 2.8: dry and clean in the day within 4 days. We'v left night-times for now, whilst it beds in. Toddlers are dying to be 'grown up' and to please - if it's a battle, it means they're not ready. How many incontinent nappy-wearing adults do you know, OP? (Apart from the weird ones on ch4 documentaries!? )

It sounds like a full-time job to try when your child is physically and cognitively incapable of training - to me, it sounds like you've got pot(ty) luck rather than progress at the moment. The nappy companies have plenty of ways of making money already

As others have said, if your DD is still having accidents then clearly your DD is not potty trained. I tried putting my daughter on a potty at 18 months and she just didn't want to know. At 2 years 8 months we camped in the kitchen for a few days, I let her wet her knickers a few times and three days later that was that. I can count the number of "accidents" she has had since then on one hand. It only took another month for her to be dry at night. She just said "mummy, no nappy tonight" and again, she has only wet the bed about three or four times since then. She is now ten years old BTW.

When they are fully potty trained children do not keep having accidents all the time.

DS was dry at 2.5, including at night, of his own accord, but asked for a nappy to do a poo, at the same time each day. It was no hassle and I went along with it. Just after he turned 3, he started using the toilet for poos, again of his own accord, with a little bit of encouragement (and chocolate). So - no "training", no accidents, and chilled out mum and DS. Definitely preferable in my opinion.

Another EC story here. I started putting DS on the potty at 5 months, at nappy changes which I timed around him. No stress, no extra work (he just sat on the potty while I put the nappy in the bucket and got out another one, liner etc etc). I got quite good at timing so probably cut the dirty nappies by 50% or so. If I was out and about and there wasn't a potty then I just changed him - didn't tie me to the house! At 1 he went to nursery 4 days a week, they didn't use the potty with him then. At 18 months he stopped using the potty (as in, nothing happened when he sat on it, which was unusual over a period of a few days) and this lasted for 2 months. Then at 20 months when he was running around with no clothes on he started to go over to the potty independently and use it.

So after 2 months of him asking for the potty and using it, while still being in nappies and using the potty at change time, I decided he was 90% of the way there. So he went into pants. After about 2 weeks with a few accidents he is now trained and can easily hold urine for 2 - 2.5 hours. I think nursery would have told me if it was too difficult for them, which it would have been if he wasn't ready.

This worked for me. It doesn't work for everyone. I am happy to tell people how we did it but it was mostly down to DS. I hope I don't get seen as weird or cruel, or pushy.
I do prefer bringing home the occasional wet pants from nursery to a bag full of wet and dirty nappies. My philosophy was to bring him up so that a potty was as natural as, say, using a cup to drink from.

And I am fully prepared that with no 2 it might be a completely different kettle of fish!

This is the first time I have seen an ec thread get this nasty.

From my experience I would disagree with :

"Bet you don't take the same approach with your 2nd"

Actually DH and I were MORE motivated with DS2 because we saw that it "worked".

"poor bladder control"

DS2 at 3.5 has been totally dry at night for a year and half now, and will commonly only go for a wee an hour or so after waking, if not later (despite regularly drinking from a flask of water at night).

His bladder control is better than mine!

We did ec part-time as we work full-time outside the home.

As other ec-ers will agree, the GOAL is not reaching the finish line (being totally independant and reliable on the toilet), so much as taking your cue from your child.

As my mother (a biologist) pointed out, baby birds don't soil their nests, nor do other animals, it's not natural to.

DS2 at 3.5 has been totally dry at night for a year and half now

But that's not crazy unusual. It's NORMAL. You don't need to do EC to have a child who's dry at night at two or so, give or take a few months. You just need to have one who's ready for it. DD had no experience of potties until she was 2.1 and she didn't like them much. However, a couple of months later she was dry day and night inside a few days, because she was ready. There was pretty much no need to teach her what to do or respond to her cues or hover about because she was absolutely ready to do it and wanted to do it and liked doing it and knew what she was doing.

the GOAL is not reaching the finish line (being totally independant and reliable on the toilet), so much as taking your cue from your child

I think this is nuts. If you were taking your cue from the child, surely you'd wait until they had some personal investment in pooing or weeing independently? I genuinely think that most babies could not care less where their wees and poos go. I imagine a healthy percentage of them would like to eat them or play with them. If the goal is not being independent (and this contradicts your self-congratulatory post about having a perfectly normal child who was dry day and night at two) then why trumpet the whole 'you can potty train them early' thing as the OP did? About her untrained child who wees in a potty when her mother manages to catch it about 50% of the time.

Also, I do rather wonder what difference people think it makes in the long run? If none, then why do all the months of wee-catching? I mean, the vast majority of children are potty trained in the traditional not having accidents sense of the word by three or four, in time to go to school. This is when they actually NEED to be independently able to manage their wees and poos. Why stress about it earlier than that when it literally makes sod all difference to anyone apart from making more work for the poor mother? Or do EC people think potty training at 2+ is somehow incredibly damaging for a child? If so, I do struggle to see how or why.

I don't think the thread is particularly nasty, btw, it's just that most people are genuinely gobsmacked at the thought of creating more work for yourself when you could be having a nice time with your kid instead.

I don 't think the thread is nasty either. But I do think the OP has put lots of us on the defensive with the tone of her first post.

"I don't mean to be patronising"... but I'm going to be anyway.

We all have different parenting methods. Get over it.

The EC method sounds interesting, but is very time consuming - several months/years instead of my 3 days. DD couldn't sit up independently until she was 10 months, so any earlier would have been a waste of time. I waited because it was the easier option and it worked for me.

It also looks like the EC supporters have a different view of what constitutes being fully potty trained. IMO being completely potty trained means no accidents.

It just seems such hard work. And for what benefit?

jamaisejedors, I don't think your DS's bladder control is down to ec - some children just have more bladder control than others, and earlier than others. As I said DS was in nappies all the time til 2.6. But he was waking up completely dry, so we stopped using them - we had never done any potty training or ec. He's now almost 4 and I have to persuade him to go after lunch, otherwise he will only go after he gets up (same as yours, could be an hour after), and before he goes to bed! Whereas I am on the loo all the time!

I agree that the thread hasn't turned nasty - I think people just have strong opinions on someone claiming to be "baffled" that one should wait until a child is ready to go to the toilet themselves (particularly when she is doing it when the child can't even sit up).

IMO being completely potty trained means no accidents.

Well, exactly. DD is four, has been potty trained for nearly two years and has had a handful of accidents - all but one of these were related to being ill, such as diarrhoea which is hardly her fault. And the one time she had an actual proper accident and pooed in her pants, it was because she'd refused to try before we left the house and then we couldn't get to a loo in time. She never made that mistake again - she was absolutely mortified!

I don't think your DS's bladder control is down to ec - some children just have more bladder control than others, and earlier than others.

Agree with this, too. My daughter wees three times a day, after gettting up, at lunchtime and when she goes to bed, like clockwork. She's been the same since well before she was potty trained. Her father OTOH seems unable to go more than an hour without a wee!