Considerations on the method

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I did not experience early potty training as an instruction, but as another way of taking care of my children. I did not give myself time goals to achieve, I simply followed their growth process trying to understand when they were ready to take the next step, as it happens for all the other areas of child development. Carrying my newborn son in the bathroom was for me become as normal as dressing him, washing him and preparing him food. Maybe you waste more time? Is it less practical? For me it wasn’t, but it’s a matter of choice. As well as, for example, there are those who choose to wean their child only with baby food and ready-made baby food and those who “waste time” to prepare each time a different meal with organic seasonal products.

About the time when traditionally it is recommended to remove the nappy to children, I red that the baby is ready when he is able to say that he has to “pee” or “poop”, or is able to pull down his pants. These statements make me perplexed: it’s like saying that the right time to switch from breast milk or baby bottles to baby food happens when the child is able to eat alone with a spoon…

As for sphincter control, I have a very specific episode in mind. My son was about a month old and he was naked on the changing table: I was playing with him and I was watching him to see if he was giving any signals before peeing. At one point I answered the phone and while I was talking he began to pee: instinctively I shout “nooo!”. He stopped, probably a little scared of my tone of voice, so I put the phone down, I put him in position on the sink and there he started to urinate again. This led me to think that even before 18-24 months there is a form of sphincter control, maybe involuntary, but there is. Probably at 18-24 months he can decide to refrain from doing it when he feels the stimulus, but right away he is able to relax the muscles to discharge if put in a favorable position when he has a full bladder.

How do you find the right time to make him pee? It’s a matter of communication between parent and child. Every mother learns to recognize the signs that indicate the needs of her child, be they hunger, tiredness, discomfort, etc… When she learned them, she tries to prevent them to avoid a difficult situation. For example, a mother who “knows” when her 8-month-old son is hungry arranges to prepare his baby food in time, to avoid that he is too hungry and that he eats crying. So when I thought my son should pee, I carried him to the bathroom.

Following this method I did not find the difficulties that sometimes involved parents struggling with the abandonment of the nappy by their two-year-old child. In fact, up to two years parents accept that their baby do his needs in the nappy, then at some point children are asked to do them elsewhere. And this is precisely in the age of the first whims, of the “no”, of the attempt to affirm his personality, when the child is less inclined to news. Always making a comparison with food it is as if we cooked a single meal for the child up to the age of two and then we told him that baby food is no longer good and that it’s time to start eating other things. I believe that proposing different foods from the beginning of weaning naturally leads the child to eat a bit of everything. In the same way my experience leads me to say that carrying the newborns on the potty or on the toilet since the first days of life favors a gradual and natural process of learning and growth, as regards the fulfillment of physiological needs, it increases the autonomy of the baby and, not to be underestimated, it reduces the work of parental care.

For details on the potty training method, I refer to the book quoted in the page “Potty training too early?”

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