The Diaper-Free Baby_ The Natural Toilet Training Alternative - Christine Gross-Loh [2]
Of course, many children sail through conventional potty training just fine. But there are countless others who have trouble recognizing which muscles to use to hold or release pee or who just find it physically and emotionally difficult to let go of the diaper they have been used to all their lives. Even after some children become aware of the elimination sensation, they are still so accustomed to diapers that they actually request a diaper to put on before they go to the bathroom! Others simply take a long time to train, and their parents resort to pleading, bribes, stickers, M&Ms, videos, musical potties, and other such gimmicks. Still other children suffer from excruciating diaper rash, fiercely resist diaper changes, or otherwise find diapering to be an unpleasant experience the whole way through. They develop negative associations with anything having to do with diapering and elimination itself.
You’re probably reading this book because you hope to avoid these scenarios, and EC fits in with your parenting philosophy and resonates with you for financial, environmental, or personal reasons. Read on to learn more about EC and why I recommend you consider practicing it with your baby.
ELIMINATION COMMUNICATION: A GENTLE ALTERNATIVE
Imagine what it would be like if your baby was so accustomed to the concept of using a toilet as, well, a toilet, that when it did come time to become completely toilet-independent, she took the process completely for granted, so that the transition was utterly smooth. Imagine if this toilet independence came about without bribes, struggles, resistance, or tantrums and was instead a natural, completely gentle, noncoercive process that your baby was fully participating in, so that as an infant, she would be able to let you know when she had to go to the bathroom, and by the time she was walking, she could toddle over to the toilet by herself just like she might toddle over to the kitchen if she were hungry. That’s what happens in many families who practice EC with their babies.
EC is a lost art in our society. It is still practiced throughout the world, mostly in countries where disposable diapers are considered a luxury if they are available at all. In fact, there are many people out there who think that we are odd for relying on diapers so much. It’s really diapers that are the new phenomenon—not EC. In the United States, some version of early potty training was practiced up until disposable diaper use became more widespread in the 1960s and ’70s. Before this time, most children were out of diapers by age two, if not earlier. EC is still practiced in at least seventy-five countries, including China, India, Greenland, and Russia, and in many other parts of Africa, South America, and Asia. Because the children from many of these cultures have never had to lose the bodily awareness they were born with—mothers or caregivers simply hold babies away from them when they sense they need to go—most of them are toilet-independent incredibly early from our society’s point of view. One study states that 50 percent of the world’s children are toilet trained by the age of one. Many internationally adopting parents are “startled” to find that their babies arrive already able to use the toilet, according to the New York Times. With statistics like these, the idea that toilet training shouldn’t begin until age two or three, when the child meets the conditions of an arbitrary checklist for “readiness,” seems more and more absurd.
But it’s common for parents to be skeptical even in the face of all this evidence. Even if EC works and children are physically and emotionally capable of doing this, it still sounds utterly overwhelming for new parents in our society. We live in homes