Potty Training Marvel?

Before becoming a mom, I had seen various quotes on how much money it takes to raise a child from birth through high school. According to the USDA, parents of a child born in 2010 will spend $206,180 to raise him or her. This number shocked me!

To save money, I vowed that I’d do just as my mother and grandmother had done and use cloth diapers. Little did I know that a teaching stint in China, and marrying into a Chinese family, would not only greatly change my views on potty training, but help my son learn to communicate better, not to mention saving me a lot of time washing dirty diapers!

In China, I seldom saw a child in a disposable diaper. Nearly all kids under the age of three were clad in split pants, pants with an open crotch seam which allows for parents to easily hold them over a toilet or for a child to sit on the toilet without having to remove their pants. It was culture shock at it’s finest! During my high-school babysitting days, I was used to changing diapers on kids as old as four and didn’t give a second thought about it.

Reading an article online, followed by a friend’s blog post, led me to learn more about the elimination communication method of potty training children from infancy. Did you know roughly half of the children in the world are potty trained by their first birthday? The elimination communication method looked intriguing, so I filed it away in my memory for possible future use.

Fast forward two years. I found myself married, pregnant and with very traditional Chinese in-laws who cringed at the fact that I brought a pack of disposable diapers to use in the hospital for the sake of convenience. Once home, I switched to cloth.

When Nathaniel was a month old, my husband said that his female coworkers were surprised that I hadn’t started potty training the baby yet. I had noticed that my in-laws would hold Nathaniel over a large wash basin and whistle as a way to get him to do his thing. Realizing that there was nothing to lose, I began potty training my four-week old.

I’d read that to encourage a child to go to the bathroom, it’s best for the parent to make a noise that sounds like running water, certainly better than whistling as if my child were a dog like my in-laws did!

Two main factors to watch for are the child’s facial expressions and body movements during feeding. I stopped reading aloud while nursing, and began to watch his every move. He usually needed to go potty ten to fifteen minutes after he stopped eating when he would make a funny face. Sensing it was time, I’d remove his diaper, hold him over his potty chair and…he would actually go! It took about three weeks for me to really know how to read his cues and get comfortable with the process.

By three-months, he was rarely wetting a diaper while awake; at four-months he would stay dry while we were out running errands. If he needed to go, he’d start fussing and I’d find the nearest bathroom as quickly as I could. By five months he was no longer soiling any diapers at night, though an accident would occur about once a month. I was pretty much done with washing diapers and buying wipes by then!

Shortly after my son’s first birthday, he was able to walk into the bathroom and sit on his potty chair all by himself. He’s now approaching four, and we’ll be starting this process soon with his newborn sister.

Tips:

1. Pay close attention to the baby for the first weeks. Babies often make faces before they soil their diaper and I quickly noticed that my son always stopped nursing right before he’d soil his.

2. Commit to trying for at least three to four weeks to give you and your child time to get comfortable with a new routine. Be consistent!

4. Praise your child liberally when they succeed and never scold them when they don’t.

While I certainly don’t think this method is for everyone, it is something worth considering as a way to teach your child self-awareness, and to help save money and the environment. It’s not a fast process, but I believe it’s worth the time spent to get them out of diapers years earlier. There’s no harm in trying it out since you can always go back to your preferred method of diapering if it doesn’t work for you or your child.

Thank you, Charlotte, for sharing this insightful story with the Mamapedia community.