About twenty years ago, as I was researching my family tree, I’d think about my great-grandmothers’ lives. They had very large families; a dozen children was not an unusual number. Every day was pretty much the same—lots of cooking and cleaning and loads of laundry. And then I thought about the diapers. One of my great-grandmothers had 15 children. That’s a lot of dirty diapers! It just seemed unfathomable to me. With all the modern conveniences of appliances and electricity to run them, I could barely keep up with feeding my family with five children at home and cleaning the house. I couldn’t imagine throwing in washing all those diapers by hand, day in and day out.
I wasn’t even looking for answers or any kind of solution, but one day I stumbled across an idea that really resonated with me. The article I was reading called it “natural infant hygiene.” It’s also known as infant potty training and elimination communication. The premise behind it is that a mother is so close to her baby and the baby is in tune with her body and s/he tells mom when it is time to go. Mom places baby on the little potty chair—with support if necessary—and the baby goes.
And apparently, this is what happens in other cultures (perhaps without the official potty chair) and what happened with our own culture before women started working outside the home and diapers became a necessity.
At the time, I was pregnant with what turned out to be my last baby. And to me, the whole idea of infant potty training sounded a little wild and totally fabulous. But at the same time it seemed perfectly rational. My great-grandmothers had so many children. Of course, this is something they would have done to avoid washing so many dirty diapers. I was going for it.
I purchased a one-piece potty chair and some very absorbent infant undies (wish I could remember the brand—they were really brightly colored solids and didn’t look like underwear). And I had two packages of newborn diapers and one each of the next two sizes up. Because while I was quite committed to trying this idea out, I wasn’t going to risk accidents when we were going for a long drive or to church.
I started trying the potty out with Ellie when she was about two weeks old. Some people start right away, some wait a month, preferring the baby to develop more muscle control of the neck and head. To my surprise, it actually worked pretty well. What I read was true: babies do not go potty in their sleep. They have to wake up to do it. And they usually also go right after eating.
Another thing surprising to me was that when I missed her
cues, the accidents were really
small. Little babies don’t actually pee
a lot, and the training pants (the good ones, anyway) are really
absorbent. Some days I’d have a bad day
and have to change my shirt or pants, but most of the time I’d keep clean. Ellie was a pro at this whole potty training
thing and we very rarely had any accidents with poop. But even when we did, it wasn’t a huge
deal. Little babies don’t usually poop a
lot, either. Usually. Every baby has those Armageddon-type blowouts once in a while.
Some people mock the whole idea, saying that it’s the parents who get trained. So what if it’s true? Shouldn’t parents be close enough to their babies to communicate? And won’t it be better to not be washing a boatload of dirty diapers by hand every day when the grid goes down?
To be able to put the infant potty training concept into practice, the new mother and baby will need a potty chair and the potty training pants. Disposable diapers for car trips and other outings might be desirable. Because the baby and mother need to stay in close communication, a sling for wearing the baby is also a good idea. (But one I could never pull off. It was just too hard on my back.)
Unfortunately, as I wrote above, I didn’t learn about elimination communication until I had my last baby. Had I known with any of her older siblings, I would have done it in a heartbeat. Toilet training my toddlers was close to torture. Starting with an infant was an absolute breeze. To be sure, it wasn’t perfect. There was that one time we took perfectly-potty-trained three-year-old Ellie to a pit toilet when we were camping in Yellowstone. She took one look at that pit toilet and completely lost it then and there.
In a nutshell, it’s important to:
- Maintain close contact between the mother (or other caregiver) and baby so that good communication can occur
- Put the baby on the potty chair immediately after feeding and after waking up
- Accept that there will be some miscommunication and accidents, but know it will be way easier than trying to toilet train a toddler
The potty chair will run about $20. The training pants will cost about $60 in all. Being able to brag that your child was totally trained at eight months? Priceless.
Links to related posts:
16 february 2021
Disposable diapers are a recent invention and a luxury. When I was a child my mother used cloth diapers. She owned a couple hundred of them and that supply lasted long enough for her to raise 7 kids. And that was what was used for a long long time. While not a particularly pleasant method it does work.
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