Potty Training: What About Cognitive Readiness?

In my last posting I pointed out that the American Academy of Pediatrics cites three factors as indicators that a child is “ready” for potty training: physical, cognitive, and emotional. In that post I focused on physical readiness, pointing to the fact that children used to routinely be trained by 18 months as clear evidence that children are physically ready much earlier than they are currently given credit for.

Today I’m taking a closer look at the second factor: cognitive readiness. According to the AAP, in order to actively participate in potty training, children must understand what it is they are supposed to do and be able to communicate about it. That is, be able to:

1. Associate the need to eliminate with using the potty
2. Understand simple instructions
3. Signal an adult when they need to go

Again, the fact that children in the past were routinely trained by 18 months indicates that the first two of these abilities are both available quite early and certainly by 18 months.

As for signaling an adult, that’s easily dealt with through the use of simple signs! Just as children can learn to let their parents know when they feel the internal pangs of hunger, thirst, and even illness using simple signs like EAT, DRINK, MILK, MORE, and HURT, they can equally easily signal the urge to eliminate using a simple sign—POTTY. We’ve seen it work ourselves and have heard success stories from countless parents.

Bottom line? Using simple signs helps provide children the “cognitive readiness” they need to take and active role in potty training even before they can talk.

Linda

Linda Acredolo, Ph.D.

Co-Founder, the Baby Signs Program

and

Professor Emeritus, UC Davis

Potty Training: What Does “Ready” Really Mean?

After taking a brief break to talk about my new grand-niece, I'm back to potty training. The time is right given that potty training in warmer weather is easier and spring (we hope) is right around the corner for many of us.

Parents frequently hear that it’s best to wait until a child is “ready” for potty training before beginning the process. But what exactly does the term “ready” mean? For the answer we turn to the American Academy of Pediatrics’ (AAP) Guide to Toilet Training (2003). According to the AAP, parents should watch for readiness in three specific developmental domains: physical, cognitive, and emotional. Over the next few postings, we’ll take a closer look at what’s required in each case starting with physical readiness.

According to the AAP, in order to actively participate in potty training, children must be physically able to:
• Sense when they need to eliminate
• Delay elimination long enough to get to the potty
• Sit independently on a potty chair

At what age do these skills typically appear? This is an easy question to answer based on the information about the history of potty training I described in my 1/14 posting. If you’ve had a chance to read that entry you may remember the fact that before the invention of the disposable diaper in the early 1960s, children in the United States were routinely trained by 18 months! Is there any reason to suspect that children have changed so radically over the last 50 years that they’ve completely lost these physical abilities? Obviously not! If that was the norm up until the 1960s, then clearly children today are physically ready for potty training well before age 2.

In other words, it’s simply a cop out (as my son would say) to use a lack of “physical readiness” as an excuse to delay potty training until children are 2.5- to 3-years-old.

Stay tuned for discussion of cognitive and emotional “readiness.”

Linda

Linda Acredolo, Ph.D.
Co-Founder, the Baby Signs Program
and
Professor Emeritus, UC Davis

Welcome, Baby Lorelei!

I had decided to dedicate the first blog entries of the year to providing advice about potty training (and the role of signing to help it along) and have already started on that mission with two postings. Rest assured I will have lots more to say on that topic, but I want to take a break to describe something else that I recently enjoyed.

I just returned from spending a week on the East Coast with my niece and her brand new baby daughter who arrived on Christmas Eve. Little Lorelei would have been my sister’s first grandchild had she not died of brain cancer 18 month ago. I had promised Judy before she died that I would do my best to fill in the painful gap her death was creating in her two daughters’ lives, and traveling across country to help with this sweet baby was a joyful, if bittersweet, way to live up to my pledge.

What new insights did this experience give me? None, really. But it did remind me about a few things:

• How tiny a newborn baby’s fingers can be.
• How soundly newborn babies sleep!
• How worried new parents, especially first-time parents, are about every little thing.
• How sweet it is to hold a baby in one’s arms knowing that it is being welcomed into this world with deep reservoirs of love.
  

And finally, it reminded me of the importance of family—not just as a buffer against the pain and sorrow that the world so often and so unfairly delivers, but also as a source of great joy and inspiration—clear evidence of the continuity of life and love.

Welcome to the world Lorelei!

Linda

Linda Acredolo, Ph.D.

Co-founder, the Baby Signs Program

and

Professor Emeritus, UC Davis

Late Potty Training: Legacy of the Diaper Industry

Back in the 1980s when my children were young and not yet potty trained at 30 months, my mother-in-law would gently chastise me by saying that her kids were all trained by 18 months. At the time I thought that was pure exaggeration—the result of faulty memory or the desire to inspire me to get the kids trained. Now I know she was telling the absolute truth!

It turns out that before the 1960s children were routinely trained by 18 months—some estimates being as high as 95% of children. Given how distasteful and time-consuming it was to deal with the cloth diapers of the day, such an early age is understandable. Cloth diapers had to be rinsed out in the toilet, laundered in strong detergent and hot water, hung out to dry, folded and stacked—all steps that had to be repeated just a few days later. No wonder moms were eager to get their children out of diapers!

All this changed in the early 1960s with the invention of the disposable diaper. The good news was that their absorbency meant that babies stayed dryer and their ease of use meant that parents’ work was reduced. There was good news for the diaper industry’s bottom line, too, given the rapturous response parents had to this incredible new invention. It shouldn’t be a surprise, therefore, to hear that the industry began promoting the idea of later and later training.

By persuading both parents and pediatricians that later was better and by creating bigger and bigger diapers, the diaper industry has managed to move the average age of completion from younger than 18 months to over age 3—and still climbing! Most recently the industry introduced a size 7 diaper that can accommodate 6-year-old kids! And don’t let the name “pull-ups” fool you. They are simply disposable diapers in the shape of underpants.

The trend toward later and later training would be fine if it was good for children—but it’s not! It’s not good for children or their parents—and it’s definitely not good for the environment.

I’ll explain all this soon. Stay tuned. . . .

Best,

Linda

Linda Acredolo, Ph.D.

Co-Founder, Baby Signs Program

and

Professor Emeritus, UC Davis

New Year's Resolution: Potty Time!

The new year is upon us and, if you’re like me, your mind out of habit is gravitating toward “New Year’s Resolutions.” (It’s a given that two of mine will be to exercise more and eat less—and this year I mean it!)

But as I let my mind drift back, it returns to a New Years over 20 years ago—1988 to be exact--when my son, Kai, was 2 ½ and I was facing (no, dreading!) the challenge of potty training. I had been asked by my mother-in-law over Christmas why he wasn’t trained yet and I told her he “wasn’t ready” and that my pediatrician had assured me that Kai would let me know when the time was right. But darn it, he seemed perfectly content to let things continue as they were! The problem with this was that I needed to enroll him in a new child care program more convenient to the university where I taught and they wouldn’t let him in unless he was out of diapers.

So, I made a New Year’s Resolution to start in the Spring. Ready or not, here I come—with the potty! By that time he was closing in on 3 and really not interested in wasting time using the potty when he could be playing and just using his diaper as he had been doing for the past 30 months. Problem was that the child care enrollment deadline was looming and he simply had to get trained!

Fortunately, the passage of time has dimmed my memory of the struggles that ensued (and there were struggles)—with one exception. I remember vividly promising the director of the child care center that he was, indeed, trained—and then feigning surprise when they would inform me that he had had an accident again. “Oh, I’m sure it’s the stress of starting a new school,” I lied. I’m not proud of myself for lying to them, but, like many parents before and since, I was desperate!

Since that time I’ve learned a lot about potty training, enough in fact, to feel comfortable writing about a book about it and creating a whole program designed to make it easier for parent and child alike. In the next few postings I’ll talk about some of the most important lessons I’ve learned in the hope that it will help some of you out there to make good on your own New Year’s “Potty Time” Resolution.

Happy Signing!

Linda

Co-Founder, the Baby Signs Program

and

Professor Emeritus, UC Davis