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—SAM, MOM TO WILLOW, 14 MONTHS

At one point, I was having a hard time, feeling like EC hadn’t worked for us, since we missed so many pees. But I was at the park one day with my son and his little friend (who had just started toilet training), and Orlando had to pee, so I took him to the bathroom. After my son peed, I went to offer the little girl the potty and was shocked to find her diaper full of poop, which I hadn’t dealt with in a long time. I talked with her about her poop while cleaning her up. At the same time, there was a woman changing her toddler outside the bathroom, continually making sounds of disgust as she held her son’s legs up in the air and wiped him.

At that moment, faced with the reality of what it can be like when kids are diapered, I really realized that, while some people think that EC is a lot of work, diapering is not only a lot of work but also means a lot of contact with pee and poop.

—STACY, MOM TO ORLANDO, 30 MONTHS

As parents, we will always have issues and expectations, and EC is good practice for how I want to handle them. For instance, I might think, “I know that he can do this.” But in the future, when he is learning to, say, ride a bike, merely telling him, “I know that you can do this” won’t be very helpful. I would like to be the kind of parent who helps him overcome any internal blocks or doubts or is simply present to support him as he learns. And I’ve tried to model that kind of behavior when we have a lot of misses. We did have a potty pause, and he declared he’d rather use a diaper for a while. So we let him use the diaper and continued to offer pottytunities in subtle ways. We also continued, every morning, to offer “underwear or diaper?” without having an expectation of either, like it was a new choice every day and he could decide. For us, that mostly did it. When he went back to underwear, we were back on track.

When we have out-of-sync days, I decide it’s because we are not today the persons we were yesterday, and we just need to get back in harmony again as the new and growing people we are now.

—MARIE, MOM TO AIDAN, 29 MONTHS

GRADUATION

What does it mean to have a toilet-trained child? Most conventional definitions include the requirement that a child must be able to complete everything independently, including taking himself to the bathroom and taking off and putting on his own clothes. EC’ers, on the other hand, don’t necessarily expect their children to be able to dress themselves or to seat themselves on the toilet to be able to use a toilet, especially for a child who is fully miss-free as a baby or young toddler. If they wait until their children meet that arbitrary requirement, their children might miss out on months or even years exclusively using the toilet for elimination.

In general, an EC “graduate” is a child who is pretty much using the toilet consistently and no longer having misses, or at least not on a regular basis. Parents may still be offering opportunities to the child or accompanying him to the toilet, and in fact, my chats in the bathroom with my sons long provided welcome downtime for us during a hectic day. My friend Laura likens EC graduation with eating; even when a child has completely weaned and is eating solids, he’ll still need help cutting up his food. You’ll still be monitoring to determine if you should offer him a snack before an outing or to keep his energy up, and so forth. I really like this comparison and find that it helps parents make sense of their continued role in the life of their new EC graduate.

For some EC’ing families, graduation can arrive very quickly. This was the case for our first son. Benjamin went from using diapers full-time to, after a few weeks of intensive diaper-free time and lots of cueing and communicating, being miss-free for good. Others, like my second son, Daniel, arrived at graduation more gradually. While we’d stopped having poop misses during infancy, I’d say that between twelve and