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A. Your baby is still so very young. Likely he is still nursing or eating, maybe even sleeping, in different places. The important thing now is to help him retain his bodily awareness. It’s not always possible for a child of this age to hold it until you can get him to an actual bathroom, and this would create unnecessary work for you too, since children of this age might need to go somewhat frequently. As he gets older, he will want more and more to imitate the people around him. Through his observations and your conversations with him, he will naturally recognize that the bathroom is where you use the toilet (just as the kitchen or dining room is where you eat and the bedroom is where you sleep).

Q. “I can only practice EC part-time. Won’t this be confusing to the baby?”

A. Many parents erroneously believe that EC needs to be an all-or-nothing endeavor. This is absolutely not the case! Your baby can be EC’ed part-time, and she can go between a diaper and a potty just as a baby can learn to go between the breast and a bottle.

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WHEN YOU ARE NOT ABLE TO BE WITH YOUR EC’ED BABY

When some people first hear about elimination communication, they think it is an impossible, labor-intensive practice, mostly involving the baby’s mother, which would keep her from ever going out on her own without the baby. In fact, it may appear to them to be something reserved just for stay-at-home moms who have no other children to care for and few other responsibilities.

Indeed, a close and responsive relationship between parent and child is essential to EC, and having the time to spend with your child makes it easier to connect with him. Yet this doesn’t mean that EC excludes anyone who spends time away from his or her child. Many working moms and dads practice EC, just as many working moms and dads conventionally toilet train their older children.

For parents who need to be routinely separated from their babies, EC is actually a wonderful way to make the times that you do have together a meaningful bonding experience and provides yet another way to really get to know your preverbal child. A woman at our DiaperFreeBaby meeting once noticed that her daughter was going through a phase in which she enjoyed going to the potty with her father more than she did with her mother, even though her mother was the parent at home with the child. We figured that perhaps the baby preferred the father to take her because she didn’t see him as often.

As EC guru Laurie Boucke, author of Infant Potty Training says, elimination communication is one wonderful way that a parent who is not around all the time can bond with his or her child. It’s especially gratifying for fathers. “Fathers can’t breast-feed, but they can help at the other end,” she says. This is one way to participate in child care in a concrete, meaningful way. The same goes for other relatives or adults who may be involved in the child’s life on a regular basis, such as caregivers or grandparents. In fact, you’d be surprised how many grandparents are on board with EC, since, naturally, the concept of putting an infant on the potty was much more common some generations ago!

No matter what, if your baby is in the care of other people while you are working, EC provides another possible way for your child to gradually understand that other caring, loving people in his life will be able to help meet his needs.

Sometimes, fathers, mothers, or other adults in the child’s life may not feel confident about practicing EC with a baby this young. They may not feel able to connect with the baby in this way, and they’d rather just use a diaper when they’re caring for him. That’s okay too, of course. In the next stage or two of their baby’s life, they will probably feel more enthusiastic and confident as their child takes even more initiative for himself. For now, you, as the parent practicing EC, can always enlist the help and support of those hesitant others in different ways. My husband, for