7 Old Men On Potties

Before I potty trained my daughter I went to the library and checked out every single potty training book on the shelf. While they were all full of helpful hints about when, where, and who and how to potty train, none of them really explained the why; that is, what exactly it is about each method that entices a child to sit upon the porcelain throne and let loose that first time.  Sure, most of the advice was good, but there’s more to it then the “how to.” Behind every successful training tip there is over a century of study on child psychology that has led toward all our modern methods, and I wanted to find the connection between potty training and developmental psychology.

So I looked back a little further, to those endearing pipe-smoking balding and bespectacled old guys who poured their lives into the detailed observation of children to leave us a legacy of truth about just what it is that helps them learn. While they didn’t all have something to say specifically about potties, I have found that when you apply the science, you get much of the same information as the modern potty training books are advocating. While I can only scratch the surface of each theorist’s core ideas, I’m going to take a stab at what I would guess each of them would have to say about potty training, if they were required to boil it down for a blog post.

Len Vygotsky (1896 –1934) Soviet Belarusian Psychologist

Len Vygotsky

Vygotsky’s theory was that children acquire knowledge in what he called the Zone of Proximal Development, or ZPD. This means the gap between what a child can do independently and what a child can do with your help. He stated that proper interaction and support with a child can bridge this gap, so that what a child can do with your assistance today, he will be able to do on his own tomorrow. If you are attempting to teach outside of this zone, learning isn’t going to happen as readily.

How does this relate to potty training? You need to be sure you are in the zone. Your child should have something that she is able to contribute to potty training before you begin, but it’s not necessary that she should be able to do everything.  Maybe your child can walk to the potty, she can control her own bladder and bowels, and perhaps she can communicate that she needs to go.  But it’s possible that your child can’t undo her own buttons, portion out toilet paper, or turn on the faucet. That’s okay. Your assistance will bridge the gap between what she can do on her own and what she can’t yet manage. You will work within the ZPD.  If you think you need to wait until your child is old enough to operate the faucet unsupervised, you may be waiting too long. If you begin the process before she is able to contribute anything to the process, you are starting too early. One of the complaints I hear often from caregivers is that they had a parent tell them their child was potty trained, but they were disappointed to discover the child was unable to wipe himself. One woman even said to me, “if he can’t wipe, he ain’t trained!”  Well not yet, perhaps, I thought. But he’s in the upper reaches of the ZPD and if you aren’t willing to help him, it will take an extended period of time to get him there. 

Urie Bronfenbrenner (1917-2005) Soviet- American Developmental Psychologist

Bronfenbrenner lists Vygotsky among his main influences. But he went on to explore more external factors, not just the relationship between caregiver and child. He developed the Ecological Systems Theory, which examines the relationships between a child and his direct environments– home, school, community, etc, the relationships between these environments. Each environment which influences a child has its own norms, roles, and rules, and how a child relates one to another affects the way he learns and develops. Inconsistencies between environments can account for why a child behaves one way at home and another way at school, for example.

When you are in the process of potty training, you need to be aware that the home setting may not be the only influence on your child’s learning.  It is very important that the methods and systems of potty training that you choose remain consistent from one place to the next.  If your child goes to daycare or is in a shared custody agreement, or even if you have two parents in the home, the method of training should be discussed between all guardians and caregivers.  If you are at home telling your son that he is a big boy and doesn’t need diapers anymore, it’s not going to help him if his daycare teacher is slipping pull-ups on him as soon as you leave.  If you’re telling your child that he needs to learn to go to the potty when he feels the urge, but your co-parent is making him sit for pre-determined amounts of time, the mixed message will confuse your child and prolong the process.

Ernst von Glasersfeld (1917-2010) American philosopher and Psychology Professor

Von Glasersfeld’s claim to fame was his theory of Radical Constructivism. It was a philosophical concept that stated that each person constructs his own unique frame of knowledge based on his own experiences. To verbally explain all your knowledge to another person will not yield the exact same body of knowledge in the person being taught, because his own experiences will shape his frame of mind on a given subject. More importantly, to passively teach someone will not be as effective as allowing him to form his own understanding by experiencing something for himself.

It seems like a stretch to bridge epistemology to toilet training, but bear with me. Let’s ignore the philosophical debate about whether or not all knowledge is subjective. We’ll imagine that it is for the purpose of gaining toilet training knowledge. It may help you to know that explaining the use of the potty to your child is not going to yield an identical frame of understanding. You may be saying, “You sit here and go pee. You take some toilet paper, wash your hands,” and so on.  And in your mind you are expressing the simplicity of a series of logical tasks.  In your child’s mind, however, something different is taking place. He is trying to frame this information within his existing body of knowledge. All his life, he has eliminated in a diaper. What you are telling him is that everything that has been easy and familiar is now irrelevant. The potty is strange; none of the other sitting surfaces have holes in them. Up until now removing one’s pants was frowned upon but now it’s expected. If your approach is to sit down and explain the potty and have him use it in one day, your child may be thinking, “This information does not corroborate everything else I know. So I reject it.” (But not in so many words of course.) The key to solving this, then, is to use a method that gradually introduces toileting concepts from an early age so that children have a point of reference before you begin. Let your child see his or her same-gendered parent using the toilet. Let him play with a toy toilet. Let him see you empty the contents of a diaper into a toilet and have him flush it. Do all these things long before the first day you ditch the diapers and he will be more apt to get it.

Jean Piaget (1896-1980) Developmental Psychologist, Genetic Epistemologist

Jean Piaget

Piaget was a master of observation. His clinical methods not only studied the cognitive abilities children gained during various stages, he also observed the mistakes they predictably made, and the significance of each. He reasoned that the errors were what gave us a clear picture of what is actually going on in children’s minds because they exposed the challenges they were working on and the methods which resolved them. For example, when children draw a chimney perpendicular to a roof instead of to the ground, it reveals that they are still working on relative angles and are not yet able to conceptualize the whole picture.

I believe parents should take this Piagtian approach when it comes to their children having accidents. Rather than getting angry, take a lesson from Piaget and ask yourself, “Why has this mistake occurred?” Perhaps your child has an accident every time you strap her into her high chair and every time you have a dispute. One could handle the mistake punitively, but what if the reason for the accident is that your child is feeling a loss of control?  Punishing her will take even more control away from her and worsen the underlying problem. Instead, it needs to be resolved at the source. In this case, if you give her some freedom and more rights to make decisions the accidents may cease without you even having to mention them.

I’ll also mention a second area of Piagetian theory I find incredibly useful: the Schema. Piaget described a schema as a way of organizing information through mental representation and in some cases, repetitive operations, as a way of incorporating new information. More recent developments have looked at the nature of "motor schemas" and found that children’s choice of repeated actions give us insight into how they explore and learn. To put it very simply, children are more likely to learn something if they can do it in a way that’s more of the same of the thing they’re already doing. Your child may constantly throw his toys because he learned about trajectories from his toy ball and he wants to push the limits of that idea to see what else can fly, and how it flies. He’ll likely perform the experiment again and again. This is his dominant schema.

Now here’s the trick: When readying your child for future potty use, knowing his dominant schema will be of great help. Take the child who loves to toss things. If you give him a toy potty and a brown bean bag you call a “poopy,” and let him toss, he’ll learn to associate the poopy with the potty, and he’ll learn that getting it right inside is a good thing. If your child is obsessed with opening and closing things, he’ll love it if you emphasize how the potty lid goes up and down. If your child likes to wrap and enclose things, she’ll love to familiarize herself with toilet paper by wrapping up toys with it. If your child likes to transport and dump, instead of dumping the potty right into the toilet, push it to the toilet and make dump truck sound effects.  If she likes to spin and rotate things, let her put some paper in the toilet and watch how it swirls when you flush. Instead of rejecting the idea of the potty, your child may instead take notice and feel that the potty has a familiar element.

Erik Erikson (1902 –1988) Danish-American Developmental Psychologist

Erik Erikson

While psychologists like von Glasersfeld and Piaget examined how knowledge is acquired, there is a separate paradigm that looks at how personalities and identities are formed. Erikson studied the formation of the ego in childhood and broke it down into specific stages, each with its own conflicts and triumphs which he theorized would lead to specific personality traits. I won’t go into detail here about each stage of what he named the Theory of Psychosocial Development, because what we’re mainly concerned with is Stage 2: the Autonomy Versus Shame and Doubt stage.  Erikson believed that a child reached this stage between the approximate age of 1 and 2 years old. (Some sources broaden the range to 18 months to 3 years). The child is discovering her own identity and begins to fight for independence. As a parent, your role is to allow her to do things on her own to gain self confidence. This includes allowing her to make mistakes without fear of reprimand. 

In contrast to many of the more philosophical people on this list, Erikson actually had some concrete things to say about how his theory related to potty training. He felt that it was a crucial example of something to teach your child during stage 2, because using the potty is strongly linked with a sense of pride and autonomy.  Erikson stated the importance of not shaming or punishing your child for accidents during the potty training period, because accidents are part of the process and to put a child down will interrupt her resolve for autonomy. The strongest tool in your psychological toolbox is your child’s own drive to feel good about herself and to get it right.  Erikson also proposed that if a child fails to complete this stage and achieve a positive identity, it can lead to complications. In the case of potty training, if a child reaches 3 or 4 years old with an unhealthy sense of self, she may develop a learned helplessness in which she refuses to use the potty.

Sigmund Freud (1856- 1939) Austrian founder of Psychoanalysis

I was hesitant to even include Freud on this list because the scope of his opinions on elimination was daunting.  But everyone knows Freud and I’d be remiss to leave him off the list. So here goes. Freud had a lot to say on the topic of teaching toileting, and most of it was scary. His theory of psychosexual development suggested that elimination is linked to personality traits, much like Erikson. But he went to extreme lengths to warn that errors made in potty training will cause psychological disorders including, but not limited to, sexual disorders, Oedipus complexes, and identity crises. While Freud’s work is fundamental in the field of psychology, Freudian opinions about potty training may amount to alarmism in the light of modern knowledge on the topic.  As a result there is a lingering fear among parents that they will damage their child by potty training incorrectly.

But what parents must understand is that Freud was responding to the practices of his day. In the 1940’s, people trained their toddlers by means of force, punishment, and in some cases crude practices like regular soap enemas. No wonder if they got so messed up!  I’d love to say that all of Freud’s advice is irrelevant but let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater. He had some good points, the first of which is that trauma of any kind should never get mixed in with toilet training. If your family is undergoing a trauma or any major life event that may cause emotional upset for your child- divorce, a new sibling, moving, transitioning, and so on- this is not the best time to potty train. If you can avoid it, wait until a few weeks until life has become stabilized and then try potty training.

While I’m dubious about personality disorders like “anal retentiveness” emerging from poor potty training methods, one has to credit Freud for being one of the first people to prove in a clinical setting that positive reinforcement is more effective than punishment.  He was onto something that now forms the fundamental core of potty training, which is gentle encouragement.

As long as you are using a potty training method which is positive, gentle, and noncoercive, you need not worry about damaging your child’s mental state or personality. If your first attempt at potty training is gentle but unsuccessful, you may start again when your child shows interest and you are no worse off than if you didn’t try.

B.F. Skinner (1904-1990) American psychologist and Behaviorist

Skinner was the man who invented the term “Operant Conditioning,” a method of psychology that seeks to change a person’s behavior by means of rewards and punishments. Because it is concerned with changing observable behaviour instead of looking at internal psychology, the work of behaviorists is often dismissed when it comes to child rearing. A common criticism is that changing the behavior doesn’t solve the child’s underlying problems or his ability to solve them.  And that may be true in many cases. After all, we want children to be problem solvers and critical thinkers, not rats in a maze.

But a large portion of our behavior doesn’t involve thinking at all. Most of our daily routines only involve the formation of good habits. Trying to apply a laboured decision making process every time you get dressed, pick up toys and brush your teeth will become exhausting. Since using the toilet is one of these daily habits, I think it is a fantastic place to apply Skinner’s Operant Conditioning.

Your first aim, with any form of conditioning, is to identify your goal. This is easy. You want your child to urinate in the potty more often and on the floor or chair less often. The stimulus for each behavior will be the same: your child’s natural urge to eliminate and the feelings associated with needing to go, and the child’s response will be to release. 

The second rule of Operant Conditioning is observation. This is not easily done if your child is wearing a diaper. So remove it and toss it away. If you like, you can replace the diaper with underwear, pants or use nothing at all. Observe your child closely at play. When he urinates on the floor, we know from other areas of psychology that an applied punishment is not effective or necessary. The natural consequence of urinating without a diaper is an uncomfortable feeling and a long interruption of play to get changed. 

If, however, the child uses the potty, a reward should be applied. Praise and encouragement are appropriate, but a food reward can also be very effective if given immediately. You do not even need to talk about the reward or explain that it was received in exchange for using the potty. What happens in the brain is that the treat immediately and effectively spikes a dopamine response. This becomes connected with the part of the brain responsible for forming habits. Eventually, deep in your child’s subconscious, there is a part of the brain making decisions without him even knowing. 

Let’s summarize the tips we can gather from developmental psychology.

1. Potty train when your child is already able to contribute some steps to the process, but there is no need to wait until she can complete all the steps on her own.

2. Keep the potty training method as consistent as possible from one caregiver to another.

3. Familiarize your child with different aspects of the potty long before you begin training.

4. When your child has accidents, look for patterns and try to correct any underlying cause.

5. Use your child’s current interests and fixations in order to help him assimilate potty training into what he already knows.

6. Appeal to your child’s self esteem.  Never shame or punish for accidents.

7. Don’t attempt to start potty training during potentially upsetting life events. Be careful not to traumatize your child by using force or coercive tactics.

8. Reward your child with praise and special treats for using the potty. Remember that accidents teach natural consequences and they are useful for teaching as well.

As you can see, years and years of clinical observation, applied scientific method, and volumes of complicated esoteric information can be whittled down to simple applications, most of which you probably already know. So if you follow the above eight recommendations and your friends ask how you potty trained, you can proudly tell them you just applied over a century of developmental psychology.

50 Ways to Prepare Your Child for Potty Training

Experts will tell you that potty readiness will happen on its own, in time. To some degree this is true. But as I discussed in my last post, nature and nurture are a paradox; one gives rise to the other. I’m a firm believer that if you help your child become familiar with the ins and outs of pees, poops, and potties before you ditch the diapers, he or she will have an easier transition once he becomes physically and cognitively capable.

This list contains ideas for ways to help familiarize your child with bathroom practices. Some are meant to make potty use fun, and some are meant to demystify the process. When used correctly, they may help him reach a ready stage when he is developmentally able instead of being put off by psychological obstacles.  This isn’t meant to be a comprehensive how-to, but a list of suggestions to put toward a fun and individualized training method. You should select only the items on this list that you have reason to believe your child will be receptive to. It is important to use a gentle and casual approach, and be prepared to abandon any activity that your child resists.   

 

1. Invest in a potty training Doll. Potty Scotty, Emma, Fisher Price Ready for Potty Dora, or any other sort of Drink-and-wet doll is an ideal teaching aid for the child who already loves dolls. Be sure to give a demonstration and “reward” the doll with invisible treats.

2. Build a Lego potty. Attach a small brown piece to a Lego man’s bottom. Explain to your child that it’s a poop that needs to go into the potty because it’s not part of his body. 

3. Allow her to rip small pieces of toilet paper up and place the pieces in the toilet bowl. Flush and watch how they go down.

4. For the child who likes sports, play a game of Potty Toss. Fill yellow or brown socks with rice to make bean bags, and have your child toss them into a clean, dry potty bowl. Tell her the socks are like poops and pees and they need to get right in the bowl.

5. If your child is interested in buildings or factories, make a stop outside of your local waste processing plant. Explain to your child that this is where the toilet pipes lead, and inside the building the poop and pee gets cleaned up.

6. Visit a farm, pet store, or zoo and ask an employee to show you the creatures who “go” in a special place. Read “Everyone Poops” by Taro Gomi and talk about how people and animals each have their own special place, and the boy’s (or girl’s) special place is the potty or toilet.

7. Fill squirt bottles with yellow water and allow your child to squirt them into the toilet.

Potty Humor

8. Be accepting of potty humor. Humor is what happens when a person gains such mastery of a subject he or she begins to play around with it. Potty humor is a sign of understanding, and laughter can take the scariness out of the experience. You can always teach your child later on where and when the use of potty humor is appropriate.

9. Use a dry erase board to draw pictures of pees and poops in a toilet. Use the eraser to “flush” them away.

10. Use brown Play Dough to teach about poops. Have a doll or puppet “deposit” them in a dough potty and praise the toy for doing a good job.

good job! (but gross)

11. Put some fun books on the back of the toilet or in a magazine rack. Add a small stool, and allow your child to sit on the toilet as a reading area, even if fully clothed. 

12. Play “Pin the Pee Pee in the Potty” with a picture of a toilet bowl and some brown and yellow dot stickers.

13. Use a stool and step ladder and allow your child to play with water and soap in the bathroom sink. Hand washing can be an effective reward in itself for using the potty.

14. Purchase some potty training books that appeal to your child’s interests. Look for gender appropriateness, books with your child’s favourite television characters, and teaching principles that are similar to the ones you will be using.

15. With your child in your lap, watch You Tube videos about potty training and talk about them, or learn the potty songs together and sing them.

16. Take some time to teach your child self-help skills like unbuttoning and removing pants. Praise her for her autonomy.

17. Let him see his same-gendered adult family members using the toilet. Have those people provide a commentary.

18. Purposefully teach your child the words your family uses for the toilet, bodily functions, and body parts. Be consistent in using the terms you have chosen.

19. Teach your child how to sign “pee” “poop” and “potty.”  You can use American Sign Language or you can make up your own family sign.

ASL "Poop"

20. For the kinesthetic learner, teach your child a simple potty dance. It can be a victory dance for potty success, or a dance to indicate that it’s time to go.

21. Allow your child spend time with potty trained children. Talk about how big kids use the potty, but don’t make comparisons or invite a contest.

22. Obtain a toy potty and pretend your child’s favourite toys are using it.

23. Fill a train or dump truck with brown pompoms, and have your child transport and deposit the poopies to the “potty depot.”  When your child eventually uses the toilet, you can “vroom” the potty toward the big toilet and make train or truck sound effects as you empty it. For extra effect, add truck stickers to the side of the potty.

24. Play a game where participants try to walk with a ball wedged between their knees or thighs and drop it into a toy potty.

25. Show your child a diagram or a model of the human body and talk about how food passes through the body.

26. Let your child have plenty of choices each day and trust him with fun responsibilities (not related to potty training.) A child who feels he has some degree of control over his life will be less likely to over-exercise control over his bladder and bowels.

27. If your child has a dollhouse with a bathroom, play dolls with her and occasionally have your doll drop whatever she is doing and zoom up the stairs to the bathroom to go pee pee.

28. Don’t forget the boys! If he doesn’t play with a dollhouse, give Superman a can for his fortress of solitude.

29. Make a snow potty for a snowman. Put snowballs in it, or colour the snow with a squeeze bottle containing yellow water.

30. When changing your child’s diaper, talk about how soon she will be able to use the potty and she won’t have to be stuck on the boring old change table anymore.

31. Allow your child to see you unload some poop from the diaper into the toilet. Cheer, “that’s where poopy goes. Hooray!”

32. Use a hand puppet with a hole in its mouth to demonstrate how something that gets eaten comes out the hole in the bottom.

33. Watch DVD’s about potty training with your child. Often they are available from the public library.

34. Print out a digital photo of your toilet bowl and have your child “add” to it with yellow and brown markers, paints, or stickers. Talk about getting poops and pees in the right place.

35. Decorate the potty together with stickers of your child’s favourite things.

36. Play pretend or dress up with your child and incorporate a clean potty chair. Pretend it is a princess throne or a robot charger. This will help your child become comfortable sitting on it.

37. If you are creative, make up a simple song about going to the potty and sing it every time YOU use the potty. A perceptive child will link bathroom use with singing and it will become a positive association.

38. Before you make a potty reward chart for your child, make one for yourself. Praise yourself out loud whenever you go to the potty and put a sticker on the chart.  Your child might want to get in on the game without being prompted.

39. Build a ball run out of plumbing supplies. Show your child the pipes in your house if they are visible and tell her that the toilet works the same way.

40. Visit the bathroom section of a hardware store and let your child explore the display toilets, (being careful that he doesn’t try to use them!) Children are inherently more interested in things when they appear in multiples, toilets included.

41. Teach your child to wipe up spills, and once in a while have her use toilet paper.  This will teach the general concept of wiping.

42. Teach your child about his own anatomy and how it works. You can use proper terms like “urethra” and “anus”, or you can simply say bum bum and pee pee or whatever you are comfortable using. Either way, it will help your child communicate any difficulties he may encounter.

43. Give your child baby dolls with removable diapers. Talk about how little babies like to go in their diapers because they are too little for the potty.

44. Decorate the bathroom together with removable wall decals or other crafts. This will make the bathroom into a fun, familiar place where your child feels welcome.

45. If your child suffers from chronic diarrhea or constipation, keep a journal of her food intake and make an appointment with a health professional.  Potty training is much easier when children are having regular bowel movements.

46. Just for fun, have your child put a sticker on a chart when your cat uses the litter box. Have a picture of a litter box on the cat’s chart and a picture of a potty on your child’s chart. Talk about how everyone gets a treat when they learn to go pee and poop in their own correct place.

47. Use paint on a plastic doll or action figure to demonstrate wiping.  Let your child practice wiping them clean. Show him how to look for the piece of toilet paper that comes up white and signals the end of the wiping process.

48. If approve of such things, try a potty training video game or an app for your mobile device.

49. Play a game with your child that involves racing to the bathroom.  You can pretend to hop, fly or swim. Or you can tape paper footprints to the floor that your child needs to step on. Have a sort of drill where you holler “pee pee!” and the race is on.

50.  Make up a personalized bedtime story about a little boy or girl who goes on an adventure to potty land.

Is “He’ll do it when he’s ready” the worst cliché in potty training? (Why swimming salamanders should be left out of the bathroom)

Little Johnny’s mother is exasperated. She has tried everything to get her four year old to use the potty: rewarding, bribing, pleading, cajoling, drawing little targets on the bottom of the bowl, but the boy has made no progress. The first time Johnny’s parents sat him on the potty, he was 18 months old. When that failed, a well-meaning friend offered the advice, “Wait until he’s ready! You’ll mess him up, and he’ll never learn.” Now almost three years later, Johnny’s mom is wondering if she did this to him by not waiting long enough before that first attempt. Riddled with guilt, she turns to her peers for advice on how to train him before he embarrasses himself in kindergarten. “Don’t worry about it,” her friends all chime in once again. “He’ll do it when he’s ready.” Some even say “Stop trying so hard, they’ll all do it on their own eventually.”  And someone offers this encouraging anecdotal evidence: “Well, my little Petey just did it all own his own one day.” 

It sounds like reasonable advice. Everyone says it, including, in one form or another, potty training books. It absolves the parent of any guilt or need to take action. And it’s probably true that he’ll learn soon enough. But it’s not especially empowering advice for the mom who wants to help her child. And there’s something about it that just doesn’t sound right to me. I knew there was something erroneous about this way of thinking about development so I set out to explore the origins of this line, where it came from and the motives for perpetuating it. What I found was shocking.

People have different reasons for giving the ol’ “when they’re ready” line, and most of them have honest intentions. The problem is that without further clarification, the line suggests that potty training is innate; that it happens naturally without coaching, just like getting teeth or reaching puberty. Perhaps a child, while sleeping, grows the little piece of brain matter responsible for toileting. Any attempt at potty training before this milestone is sure to end in failure! To sit that child on a toilet is like making a tadpole climb a ladder.  So give up, parents, or your child will be destined toward self loathing the rest of his life...won’t he?

After pondering it for some time, it hit me. This is not a new idea. It is a very old one called maturational theory. Let me take you back to the year 1929.  A developmental psychologist named Arnold Gessell is fervently demonstrating to a baby girl how to climb up a set of stairs. The girl’s identical twin sister isn’t lucky enough get stair climbing lessons; she is the control group.  And wouldn’t you know it; both children learn to climb the stairs! Gessell eventually concludes that much of what humans do is innate, and it is futile to teach a child how to reach common milestones.   The age at which the children learn to climb, walk, or any number of tasks, he asserts, is a matter of genetic determinism. They will do it when their genes dictate they are ready. While there are some elements of truth to this, should this theory be applied to potty training? 

Swimming lessons are a waste of money for this Axolotl.

The problem with Gessell’s theory is that it was refuted by his contemporaries and nearly every successor since that time, including, in later clarifications, Gessell himself. A criticism of this study, for example, would point out that the twin without training was not kept in isolation of stairs or the people who climb them, including her own twin. Also Gessell’s sample groups were too small, and non diverse. According to one research paper, “Children were carefully sampled form the New Haven community to provide a homogenous, white, middle-class group of British or German Extraction from intact two-parent families. This sample, however, was meant to generalize to any infant...” (Thelen & Adolph). Furthermore, his hypotheses were extrapolated from results of one of his colleague’s observations on the inherent movement patterns of amblystoma, which is a fancy way of saying that he equated complex human performances to those of– literally – swimming salamanders. “Gessell clearly owes to Darwin his core assumption that the growth of mental life is continuous with and impelled by the same processes that drive all organic growth.” (Ibid) In other words, we are mere organisms. Put a baby in an oversized Petri dish with a potty, and as the processes unfold, she will eventually use it.  Though I write this hyperbolically, sadly, there have been cases of extreme neglect which disprove this assertion. In 1970, a 13 year old child named Genie was rescued from her parents after she had been locked in a room and tied to a potty chair her entire life. She was still not potty trained. (Watch the NOVA video.)

Genie

 Gessell passed away in 1961, before studies of certain feral children taught us much of what we know about the importance of environmental factors on human growth, even neuromuscular development. Even so, Gessell himself came to conclude a nurturing environment was important for the innate development to happen, thus creating a rather mind-boggling paradox. Gessell’s legacy to developmental psychology is that his work ignited the famous nature versus nurture debate, which raged for several decades before almost all psychologists came to the agreement that both nature and nurture were important for psychological– and to some extent physical–development. 

 Potty training, we now know, is one of those skills that requires both nature and nurture. While neuromuscular control of the bladder will happen on its own, society has adopted cultural expectations with regards to things like clothing and indoor plumbing that aren’t part of our evolutionary repertoire. There is no reason to believe the human brain will naturally direct a person toward a porcelain bowl like a cat to a pile of sand.  Proof positive: the city of Amsterdam issues over three thousand fines each year for public urination (Look!). Humans, it turns out, must be taught.  

Allow me deviate from my stance for a moment to acknowledge that the “nature” portion of potty training, according to some experts, is still worth consideration. Most sources will tell you that there is a degree of physical maturity that must be reached before potty training can begin. In general the experts are unclear and diverse on what exactly they mean by physical maturity.  Some maintain that children must be able to do everything from unbuttoning their pants to turning on the faucet. Advocates of Elimination Communication espouse the belief that children need only the skill of anticipating an imminent need to relieve oneself and expressing that need. The most commonly held middle ground is that children mainly need to be able to control their sphincter and bladder. In her charmingly titled book, “Pee, Poop, and Potty Training,” Alison MacKonochie says, “During the early months of life, your baby’s bladder only holds a very small amount of urine. As soon as the bladder is full, it automatically contracts and empties, forcing urine down the urethra. [...] As your baby grows, the capacity of the bladder will increase. By the time he has reached toddlerhood, voluntary control of the sphincter muscles will start to develop, and you will notice your child passes urine less frequently. This is just one of the signs that your child is ready to begin potty training.” 

So here we see that there is limited merit behind maturational theory, as it relates to elimination. A child whose bladder is emptying automatically is not going to have much success. But it’s rather ambiguous to say this happens by “toddlerhood.” When I attempted to find a more specific timeline for this bladder and bowel maturity, the numbers I found suggested anywhere from 3 to 24 months. Some suggested 15 months on average. While it certainly varies for individual children, on the whole, Western children are trained at an average age which is much higher than the average age of bladder and bowel maturation*. The age at which a North American child is potty trained today is almost double what it was at the beginning of the century, and also much higher than the rest of the world, excepting a few other industrialized countries**.  To suggest all these late trainers simply hadn’t reached an age of physical ability would be to suggest there is an epidemic of elimination muscle delay among developed countries. (Sources: *Sears, Robert R., Eleanor Maccoby, and Harry Levin (1957). Patterns of Child Rearing.  **http://disposablediaper.net)

How do you know if your specific child has physical mastery of their bladder and bowels? A child who refuses to urinate until the diaper is put back on is a child who has physical readiness. A child who squats behind the couch every time she has a bowel movement is a child with bowel mastery. A young baby who pees selectively on his Daddy every time he is the one to remove his diaper might even have bladder control. In fact, there is no evidence even to suggest that bladder and bowel muscle control can’t be somewhat influenced by environmental factors in the same way other muscles can. Consider a tiny baby who flails her arms randomly, then learns to control her fingers when motivated by a toy. Elimination muscles are no different and can also be honed with motivation. Advocates of non-western toilet training methods, including Elimination Communication, have proven that infants are capable of being conditioned to control their bladders and bowels as early as two or three months. Any number of factors could provide this conditioning. This accounts for the diverse range of ages at which a child may reach this physical milestone.   

I am not suggesting that all parents should rush to train their newborn infants. Western culture is one that frowns upon things like crotchless pants and outdoor urination (it’s cold in Canada!), and there isn’t much evidence that suggests this extreme end of the spectrum has many long term advantages. Neuromuscular control– the harmony between the brain and bladder– is in fact innate, and will happen in time barring any developmental disorders. What I am suggesting is that by the time your child reaches the age of three or four, or whatever age the parents become very concerned, physical readiness is no longer the issue.

Psychological readiness, on the other hand, is a whole other question. And that, parents, is something you can have a hand in. But first, let’s go back to the prodigy, little Petey. Petey’s mom asserts that eventually he just went on his own without anyone training him. If potty training isn’t innate, how did that happen? The answer is that Petey is being conditioned every day. Presumably he’s living in a house with at least one toilet. He sees other people going into the bathroom. He hears them urinating, he may even see or smell them. He watches television: toilet paper commercials, potty training commercials; he reads books with pictures of personified animals inexplicably perched on human toilets. Maybe he goes to daycare or sees his peers use the toilet. He gets negative feedback when he defecates in his diaper and his mother wrinkles her nose, and when he eventually tries the toilet he receives some kind of praise or approval. Petey was still “trained” with a system, and that system was an eventual environmental conformity. It worked with his learning style, and the rate at which he adapted was acceptable for his parents. 

But this won’t work for everyone. It’s a slow process for most children. There are many reasons why a parent would seek out ways to hasten their child’s psychological readiness. Problems can occur if the process is taking too long. A child can become complacent with their diapering habits. Writes Behaviour Consultant Brenda Batts, “Very often, potty training is the last skill we think of implementing, and by the time we are confronted with potty training our children they have learned potty training behaviours that, because of the passage of time, have become ingrained in their repertoire of behaviours, making potty training a very difficult process” (Ready, Set, Potty, 2010).  

If this is the case, advising such a parent to wait it out may cause even more problems down the road. Secondly, an older child who is not yet potty trained may experience problems in daycare or school. While he may be able to quickly adapt to the toilet once he is in among peers who are using it, it is also possible that a child may be embarrassed or ostracised when he is the only one still in diapers. You cannot assume that peer pressure– or peer shaming– will result in increased motivation. Some programs will not even allow a child to enroll until they are toilet trained. While this is an unfortunate policy that I don’t wholly support, it’s a fact. 

Lastly, an extended period of diapering can be financially stressful on parents. Not everyone is able to use cloth diapers, and the cost of disposables is considerable. An extra year without disposables could pay for a semester of college. The slow-paced approach might not be advisable for parents with limited means.

There is no shortage of psychological obstacles which could prevent a child from responding to a potty training plan. Some children’s needs or learning styles are more complex than the scope of parents’ understanding. It’s possible that the system parents are using has not been individualized to their child’s specific needs. According to Butts, parents must “take into consideration a child’s unique learning modes, dislikes, and sensory issues, in order to develop and implement a program that is relevant and appealing to the child.” (Ready, Set, Potty). While the author is specifically referring to developmentally delayed children here, it is no less true of average children with issues causing delayed potty training. While I won’t go into all the ways of adapting a potty training program here, suffice to say that the child-directed pace will not be universally successful with all children. 

So this raises an important question. Why is “wait until they’re ready,” such a prevalent piece of advice? Even in potty training books, this statement is usually followed by, well, a whole entire book of ways to get help get your child psychologically ready, rather than sitting idly by and waiting. But the idea that there is nothing you can do to speed the process, and if you try you will damage your child, persists. 

I read at least dozen modern books on the topic and none of them actually suggest you should do nothing and your child will just come around. At most they suggests that breaks are advisable from time to time if your plan isn’t working, but abandoning the plan all together just to end the struggle and “wait and see,” is not something most experts recommend. 

Part of it can be traced back to Sigmund Freud, who had a lot of opinions about potty training and the potential trauma surrounding it. Freud was one of the original advocates for a child directed pace. But nowadays we understand that Freud’s theories are mainly directed against the horrific and often abusive toileting practices of the forties and fifties, and used out of context they become far reaching hyperbole.  Most authors acknowledge Freud’s contribution to developmental science but understand that applying his principles too rigorously amounts to alarmism. We now know that a common sense approach to toilet training is not going to cause personality defects or Oedipal relationships. So have we not tired of beating this dead horse, or is someone resurrecting it intentionally?  

Jennifer Margulis, journalist and author of “The Business of Baby,” makes a startling claim that it may be diaper companies themselves that are propagating this idea.  She writes that disposable diapers themselves are well known to cause delays in training, and that hospitals are enabling long term diaper habits by distributing free samples. But more alarmingly, Margulis alleges that “...Mommy bloggers were being paid by Kimberly-Clark to promote delayed potty training.” While it is difficult to find proof of this, it is worth bearing in mind that media sponsored by diaper companies may be subject to content that is supportive of long-haul potty training strategies. And since most parenting themed public sources are at least in part sponsored by Huggies or Pampers, their potential for control on the subject is significant. However, to be fair, the official advice put out by the Diaper Giants’ websites does contain a mixture of pro-training and pro-waiting advice. Pampers presents a wonderfully empathetic view on what potty training must be like for children, but they also subtly suggest that children must possess all the necessary skills from managing their own clothing to washing their own hands; skills many children still struggle with by elementary school. Must we teach such perfectionism? Letting children do what they can and offering assistance for everything else is a reasonable compromise. 

Huggies’ website offers the crucial recommendation that parents follow an individualized plan. But it offers few details on how to accomplish this. And they also have this to say: “If your child starts out fine, but then gets hopelessly stuck, no worries! It’s not unusual for the potty chair to go back into the closet for weeks, or even months. If your child loses interest, hold off for a few weeks and then try again. Toilet training is a developmental process. Children’s bodies and brains are developing all the time, and each new phase sets the foundation for those to come. No amount of teaching can make those developments happen before their time. You’ll have an easier, happy time of it if you wait until you’re sure your child is ready.” 

To me, this reeks of maturational theory. And in addition to resurrecting Gessell’s “no amount of teaching” adage, diaper companies are now attempting to convince the public that keeping your child in the right kind of diapers will somehow get him out of diapers sooner. All research suggests that ditching the diapers completely will give you a better result, and as that verdict became public knowledge, Diaper giants responded by creating something special for when your child is meant to get out of diapers: the Pull-up, which is another– and more expensive– diaper.  When educated parents first became aware that Pull-ups were statistically delaying the age of potty training, the diaper giants responded by encouraging the belief that it was because the diapers worked so well and were so absorbent and comfortable that their child had no idea they had urinated.  This may be true. If the diaper giants weren’t concerned with their bottom line, this should have resulted in a less absorbent or less comfortable diaper, which might have worked but no parent would buy it. Instead they came up with things like disappearing designs, which give your child an unnatural deterrent far removed from the feeling of wetness. 

Then some genius came up with Cool Alert, which is a little better, in theory, because being cool is at least something akin to being wet. But what exactly is Cool Alert? This information was not easy to come by- it has been removed from Huggies website. But at one point it read as follows, “When the child wets the pant, sorbitol crystals dissolve, which cools the urine in the patch. When the cool urine in the patch contacts the skin, the child feels the coolness. This cool feeling is similar to the change you feel when touching cool tap water. The pants remain cool for a few minutes. Sorbitol is a sugar-like material that occurs naturally in fruits such as apples, plums, cherries and pears. It is commonly used as a sweetener in gum and in low calorie foods. In cosmetics, sorbitol is frequently used as an emollient (skin softener).”

That sounds like a great product, with lots of positive associations! Who doesn’t like apples, plums, cherries, and gum? And it’s low calorie! And perhaps it would solve a problem if your child had rough genitals that needed softening.  The fact is, sorbitol is a sugar, and sugar should go nowhere near these orifices. The product reviews for Cool Alert are loaded with one-star warnings of rashes and infections. The package itself warns to discontinue use when a rash occurs, and where does that leave a child who is in the middle of a training plan based around Cool Alerts? Diaper companies do not have your child’s best interest in mind when reaching for your bottom dollar, and the ideas they circulate should be taken with caution.

Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that all the information put out by diaper companies is meant to mislead you. Some of it is great, albeit incomplete, and some is just what certain people want to hear. What I’m suggesting is that the scales are weighted toward the long haul approach, in terms of readily available information. When given a choice between the findings of empirical scientific research, and opinions of those who adapt and redistribute those findings in order to better capitalize on keeping your children in diapers for as long as possible, it is the parents’ duty to find out about the many different approaches to potty training and select the one that best suits their child.

So let’s get back to Johnny’s Mom. If “wait until he’s ready,” is not a helpful piece of advice on its own, what is?  If you’re Petey’s mom, you might say, “Don’t stress needlessly. Many children in a nurturing environment eventually respond to societal expectations without too much coaxing. If this slow and subtle approach works best for you, it is a respectable choice.”  

But if the slow potty training is becoming an issue of concern for the parent and they are actually seeking advice on how to speed up the process, you might suggest, “Don’t take him out of diapers until he shows signs of readiness, but in the meantime you can look for ways to ready him that are conducive to his learning style and interests.”

But nobody talks like this. So perhaps the best advice might be “wait until you are ready.”  Do you have a plan? If your child is so young that you are not able to guess what approaches might be successful, you might need to wait until you are able to come up with an appropriate plan. But remember, if the plan fails, you won’t damage your child as long as you use a gentle approach. If your child resists, it’s still okay to wait until your child forgets about the failed strategy, and then come up with a new plan. You are not, as people might suggest, being an overly forceful parent if you introduce the potty and your child doesn’t take to it right away. In the next posts I discuss ways of individualizing plans and how to actually apply developmental psychology theories which hold more water than maturational theory.

Further Reading:

Can Your Baby Weild a Machete?

How Doctors and Hospitals Help Corporations Cash In On a Diaper Scam

The Science of Infant Toilet Training

What the scientific evidence reveals about the timing of toilet training