Jonathan and Elizabeth Kirschner are two adventurous, imaginative, busy kids. They've had a boundless energy since they were toddlers. And their mom, Anne Hutchins, remembers well the effort it took in toilet training them - no effort at all, actually.
"I never really trained them," the Hamilton mom says. "They trained themselves."
When Jonathan, the oldest, began showing signs of readiness, Hutchins bought a potty and a children's book about using it. But then, she says, "I let him run around naked. He quickly became aware that something was happening. He never had any interest in the little potty. He had watched us in the bathroom, and he eventually went right to the toilet."
The process was just as easy with Elizabeth, who also went bare-bottomed when she seemed ready to start learning, although her first efforts were humorously primitive. "She took great joy in going outside, running behind a tree and peeing," Hutchins says.
Toilet training - or toilet learning as some child development experts prefer to call it - isn't always that stress-free. There are dozens of toilet-training books and products on the market today, and most of them acknowledge up front that toilet training can cause tears, frustration and arguments between parent and child. Toilet training is also a milestone that many parents feel pressured to complete.
Dr. Joshua Sparrow, a psychiatrist at Children's Hospital in Boston who has co-authored several child-development books with renowned pediatrician T. Berry Brazelton, including their most recent, Toilet Training: The Brazelton Way, says he fields many questions from parents about toilet training.
"Toilet training is right up there, primarily in the context of pressure to get the child ready for preschool by 2 years and 9 months," Sparrow says. Many preschools require that a child be out of diapers.
Parents may also feel pressure from relatives and peers, or from a sense that they're failing as parents because they still tolerate a child in diapers, parenting guru Vicki Lansky notes in her updated book Toilet Training: A Practical Guide to Daytime and Nighttime Training.
The trouble is that the more pressure a parent feels, the more important it becomes for that parent to toilet train the child. Yet, if attempts to toilet train the child occur before he or she is developmentally ready, those efforts can fail, says Sparrow. "And if you fail, you're much more likely to set up a vicious cycle," of repeated failures, anger and frustration, he adds.
Changing Philosophies and Environments
Most of the experts parents turn to today - Brazelton and Sparrow, Lansky, William Sears, Penelope Leach and others - agree that before any attempts at toilet training can take place, a child must be mature enough to understand the need to urinate or have a bowel movement, and to control when and how this will occur.
Brazelton writes that in the 1960s, toilet training was a rigid practice that parents were expected to begin when their kids were only 1 or 2 years old. Stories of failure and rebellion - toddlers holding back bowel movements, older children bed-wetting - were rampant.
So Brazelton decided to try a more child-centered approach, one that encouraged parents to be more patient and wait until a child showed signs of readiness. He gave that advice to 1,190 families in his practice and recorded their progress. The new approach worked, he says. Constipation and bed-wetting were reduced to a minimum. Brazelton published the results in the journal Pediatrics and he claims that this new philosophy about toilet training took hold soon after.
But family life has changed in the last 40-plus years. More parents are working, more kids are in childcare, and there is renewed pressure to toilet train at earlier ages, according to Brazelton, who believes this has lead to another surge of toilet-training problems and delays.
Ready or Not?
How do you know when your child is ready to learn to use a toilet or potty? Here's what child-development experts say.
A child is ready when he or she:
"Children are motivated to imitate and please parents, and they have a driving need to be in control. The more these factors coincide, the more smoothly your child will accomplish the task," writes Ann Stadtler, a nurse practitioner who developed the Toilet School at Children's Hospital, which helps children who have had serious difficulty and delays in toilet training.
Even with all these signs of readiness, Stadtler reminds parents to be patient. "It takes time for a child to connect the signal that her body is giving her with the idea of relaxing and releasing her urine and stool into the potty."
A child is not ready for toilet training, if he or she resists the toilet or potty in any way, including:
The Advice Varies
Once your child seems ready and you've bought a plastic potty, now what?
Most experts say that introducing your child to the potty and stating your expectations about using it are essential. Beyond that, the advice certainly differs. Here's a look at the views of several widely published parenting experts:
• Drs. Brazelton and Sparrow - They believe that most children will not be ready to learn before age 2. They suggest having the child sit on the potty fully clothed at first with a parent sitting nearby. Parents can talk about the potty, how it's used and that it's similar to the toilet they use. Parent and child might read a book together while the child sits on the potty.
After introducing the potty a few times, try the next step - let the child run around bare-bottomed and tell her that if she feels the need, she can certainly try to "go" in the potty.
It may work immediately; it may not. But nearly universal is the advice to not punish or become angry with your child if she doesn't immediately link the need to go with actually doing it on a potty.
• John Rosemond - Publicly at odds with Brazelton's toilet-training philosophy, family psychologist Rosemond believes that a child is actually "capable" of learning between 20 and 30 months of age. He advises parents to tell their toddler that, today, they expect him to start using the potty; then remove the child's diapers and let him go bare-bottomed.
"While they're perfectly content to release warm, gooshy stuff into their diapers," Rosemond writes in his book, New Parent Power!, "children do not like these same substances running down their legs." When a child has a urine or bowel accident and shows alarm, parents can then remind him to use the potty instead. Rosemond advises focusing intensely on this training over several days.
• Willam Sears, M.D. - His toilet training advice is similar to that of Brazelton and Sparrow, except that he believes parents need to condition a child to use a potty or toilet. He advocates charting a child's diaper bowel movements for a few days, then trying to catch an impending bowel movement by getting the child to the potty in time. Eventually, the child learns the connection between urine or a stool and the potty.
• Penelope Leach, Ph.D. - She advises parents that while they should be clear with the child about using a potty, they shouldn't constantly remind the child to sit on the potty. She also emphasizes that a child won't really be ready until he can make a connection between the feeling of "having to go" and the urine or stool that results from that feeling.
Parents are the front-line experts in toilet training. Beyond the foundation of experts' advice, some parents also advocate using rewards - such as jelly beans or chocolate chips - to encourage using the potty successfully. Some resort to children's books or videos about the joys of using the potty. And some, like Hutchins, sense a child's readiness and then rely on the bare-bottomed approach to help the child make the connection between sensing the need to go and learning where to do it.
Beyond the First Successes
Beyond the initial success of using the potty are new challenges, including a child's fear of flushing a bowel movement (because he's worried that he's losing a part of himself); poor timing when away from the potty; and graduating to a stage where he stays dry all night. As with toilet training itself, all of these require patience, support, understanding and encouragement from parents.
What the experts - and parents who've been through this - will also tell you is that once a child is successful, you shouldn't make a big deal out of it - no matter how thrilled you are. Simply treat that success calmly. Point out that the child went to the bathroom just like "mommy" or "daddy," and acknowledge that the child sure is growing up.
Then maybe whoop and cheer the demise of the diaper when the child is out of earshot!
Deirdre Wilson is the national senior editor for Dominion Parenting Media and Parenthood.com.
© Parenthood.com, used with permission.
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