The Potty Boot Camp

I’ve always been a huge fan of potty training early, and not because it is a personal opinion. In the past, early potty training was the norm - not the exception. It is only in modern times that we find the average age of potty training increasing. This article by Adam Hart-Davis talks about the early potty training and the historical basis behind the rationale.

Original Link: potty-training

Text of article:

Chinese toddlers often wear split pants, so that they can be held out to relieve themselves on to the ground without soiling their clothes. In the West, however, babies wear nappies or diapers until they learn to use a pot. For many parents, the learning process becomes a battleground.

There are three probable reasons why young babies cannot learn to use pots. First, their sensory nerves (or the interpretation of their signals by the brain) are not well enough developed for them to know when they have excreted, let alone when they are ready to do so. Second, they do not know how to control their sphincters; so they can’t perform on cue. Third, even though the thought of a wet or dirty nappy is horrible to the parents, most babies do not mind it at all.

Some parents try desperately to potty-train their children much too young, and may think not only that they have succeeded, but also that they, the parents, have made a great achievement. But then at the age of 3 or even 4 the children suddenly realize they have a wonderful weapon at their disposal, and start performing at the most inconvenient moments — in the supermarket, for example, or in the middle of lunch with Grandma…

A 1989 survey in Minneapolis reported that three-quarters of parents started potty-training when the child itself was apparently ready; 30.5% between 18 and 23 months, 42.6% aged between 24 and 29 months. The average age for completion was between 24 and 27 months.

Advice to mothers has gradually softened during the last two centuries. Pye Henry Chavasse suggested in 1839 that the baby should be held out over a pot at least a dozen times a day at 3 months old; if this were done, there need be no more nappies at 4 months! Around the turn of the century, the now less-influential Sigmund Freud regarded sphincter control as part of the second, or ‘anal’ phase of development, and Freudians suggest that babies become aware that what they produce is theirs, comes out of their bodies and is part of them. Therefore it does not belong to the mother, and should not necessarily be given to her, let alone thrown away in the lavatory. Since then, psychoanalysts have suggested that much of our behaviour stems from the way we were toilet trained. To take just one example, a 1992 paper suggested that François Mittérand’s toilet training accounted for his stiffness, obstinacy, shyness, anxiety, attitudes towards money and time, ambivalence, hesitations, contradictions, and desire for power. In 1912 Edward Mansfield Brockbank said that ‘After the second month, the baby can be held … in a sitting position, with some weight on the chamber. … It should be put on the chamber before, during, and after each meal…’ In 1939 Marie Stopes wrote, ‘When a baby has responded to the touch of the chamber and passed either water or a motion, he should be rewarded by an expression of pleasure by nurse or mother. “That’s right. Good baby”… On the other hand it is a cruel mistake to show signs of displeasure or annoyance about wet or soiled nappies.’

Many clever devices are available to help anxious mothers and encourage the babies, including a musical potty, marketed with the slogan ‘Make toilet-training fast, easy, and fun!’. When gold-plated sensors register moisture they trigger one of sixteen cheerful tunes, including Yankee Doodle, Little Brown Jug, and Chim-Chim-Cheree.

— Adam Hart-Davis

Post by Suzanne Riffel, author of “The Potty Boot Camp: Basic Training for Toddlers” - a new, fast, easy toilet training method that produces remarkable results.

Below is the exact text of an article originally written by Carol Mell of the Albuquerque Journal about Dr. Linda Sonna’s book ‘Early-Start Potty Training.’

In ‘The Potty Boot Camp: Basic Training for Toddlers,’ I discuss the merits of toilet training early. Many of my opinions were backed by research done by Dr. Sonna about Dr. Brazelton and the diaper industry. The book is a fascinating read, and the author of this article summarizes it well.

http://www.drsonna.org/ptresources.htm

January 26, 2006

Squabble Over Potty Training
By Carol Mell

For the Albuquerque Journal

THE TAOS HUM: Some of us squabble with the garbage man, and some of us take on the military-industrial complex. In a quiet valley near Taos, author and psychologist Linda Sonna is challenging the great baby guru, physician Barry Brazelton, and his corporate sponsors on the subject of potty training.

The question is not if but when. In her new book, “Early-Start Potty Training,” Sonna, who has written a dozen books for parents with children of every age, maintains that everything the establishment told us about when to potty train is a load of (fill in your favorite expletive) served up to get us to buy disposable diapers for an ever-longer time.

“The notion that later (training) is better has been pushed by pediatric spokesmen for the industry since the 1960s,” Sonna wrote. “Delaying has been a boon for the corporate bottom line. The truth about the ability of young toddlers and babies to learn to use the potty may be one of the best-kept secrets in America.”

Sonna studied the work of Dr. Benjamin Spock who wrote the baby bibles of the 1940s and 1950s and those of Pampers-promoting Brazelton, “a Harvard professor turned infomercial star.”

“Spock used to say younger was better, 14 months was considered late for training,” said Sonna. “In 1961 everything changed and Spock began quoting Brazelton. That was the year Brazelton signed up with Procter & Gamble. He came out saying it was cruel to train babies too early.”

She says with the production and marketing of ever-larger diapers, experts claim even 3-, 4- and 5-year-olds can remain untrained if they have not demonstrated that “mysterious state of readiness.”

“The knowledge that it is possible to train early has been completely wiped out,” Sonna said. “Babies are born signaling, the way they do when they are hungry. Think about it. Giving a signal that it’s time to eliminate is a baby’s survival tool. They need to be in a warm dry place with others. If they were always wet that wouldn’t happen. It is up to us to learn to read the signals.”

Sonna lays out a plan for training babies from birth. Parents who recognize their baby’s cues simply hold them over the pot, making a little noise like “pss, pss” as a signal.

Diaperless babies are a fad, Sonna said, but she takes a gentler approach. For most babies, 6 to 12 months is perfect. If it sounds crazy, even Sonna had to switch paradigms.

“When I was writing my first book on potty training I thought it sounded cruel to start a baby so early. I was mystified by diaperless training, but I read it, and it all fell into place. In Mexico, there were women with naked babies in their rebozos that were never wet. I had seen it in China, too.”

In Taos she heard Hispanic parents talking. To them, “right on schedule” meant fully trained at 12 months.

She wrote an early training chapter for her first book in 2002, but the editors cut it out. No one could get an article in a baby magazine because they were published by the disposables industry, Sonna said. Now, totally diaperless training, though treated in the media as a freak show idea, got the word out that early training is possible. Sonna’s complaint was that other books didn’t talk about hygiene, the real reason for potty training.

“If your elderly parent sat in a dirty diaper you’d be horrified,” she said, “but Brazelton views parents’ willingness to allow youngsters to wet and soil themselves for a couple of extra years as a sign of respect for their bodies.” If your children are too old for diapers and you are still too young, why should you care? Because diapers are the third leading component of the nation’s landfills, said Sonna. If you add to the tons of untreated sewage the fact that diapers are made of trees and toxic chemicals, the environmental picture is not pretty.

Sonna has friends in China who tell her that the disposable push is on there with the attendant advice to wait. This is bad news in a country where infant and toddler clothing was simply made with a big opening in the crotch to make things easy. “The world will be drowning in untreated waste,” said Sonna.

With eight books in five years, Sonna feels “Early-Start Potty Training” and “Parent’s Guide to Raising Siblings,” due out in April, are her gifts to the world.

“For little me to take on a multimillion dollar corporation, the biggest in the world, was scary but I’m getting an amazing response. The book is selling well. “

Check out www.DrSonna.org to see this and other books.

Carol Mell is a freelance writer who lives in Taos, NM. You can email her at taoshum@msn.com.