Potty Training: Emotional Readiness

Over the last month, I’ve been sharing the kinds of “readiness” that pediatricians argue is critical to potty training. Previous posts have dealt with physical and cognitive readiness. Today we’ll tackle the third and final: emotional readiness.

Emotional readiness for potty training means a willingness to cooperate. According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, the likelihood of such cooperation increases after the first birthday with the emergence of the following:

• A desire for independence and self-mastery
• An interest in imitating others
• A desire for approval

Once these fundamental characteristics in place, all that’s necessary is motivating children to cooperate. In other words, anything that increases the willingness of toddlers to embrace potty training automatically creates the emotional readiness that the AAP says is essential.

So, how does one help a 1- to 2-year-old get excited about potty training? Here at Baby Signs we’ve given that question a great deal of thought. Based on what we know about development, what we’ve experienced ourselves with our own children and grandchildren, and what we’ve heard from many parents, we’ve put together a set of materials designed to do just that—inspire even 1- to 2-year-olds to “climb on board the potty train.” They are all included in a kit entitled Potty Training Made Easy with the Baby Signs Program.

A highlight of these materials is our All Aboard the Potty Train DVD featuring our popular DiaperDoodle characters who slowly act out a typical “potty routine” that incorporates five helpful potty-time signs: POTTY, MORE, ALL DONE, WASH, and GOOD JOB. Additional motivational components include a lift-a-flap board book, conductor’s whistle and stickers.

To review: If children are physically and cognitively “ready” for potty training between ages 1 and 2 and can be inspired to cooperate using fun materials, why wait! Help reverse the diaper-industry-inspired trend toward later and later potty training by getting your child out of diapers by age 2. Your child, the environment, and your pocketbook will all thank you!

Happy Signing (and don’t forget to follow us on Facebook)!

Linda

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

A Valentine’s Day Message

All of a sudden it’s February, and with February come thoughts of Valentine’s Day, the one day of the year totally devoted to “love.” What a broad term that is! The Greeks identified many, many different types of love – from the love we feel for our soul mates, to the love we feel for our friends, to the love we feel for a beautiful sunset or favorite poem. But when it comes to love, we feel sure you’ll agree that there’s no deeper or more important emotion than the love we feel for our children. One of my favorite quotations from writer Elizabeth Stone makes this point exquisitely. To have children, she says, is “to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body.” 

We know from our own experiences that parenting children is both the most rewarding and most challenging job you will ever face. More than any other life-change, the sudden responsibility of having to steer a helpless infant through the murky waters and ever-shifting currents of modern life can seem overwhelming. And with good reason. The world is a vastly different place from the one we knew as children ourselves. As we struggle to raise our children while also dealing with unimaginable technologies, economic and political uncertainty, changing moral attitudes, and growing cultural diversity, it’s only natural to make mistakes along the way.

Fortunately, children don’t expect or need perfection from us. Children, even during the infant and toddler years, are flexible creatures with a capacity to forgive – just as long as the scale, overall, is very clearly weighted in a positive direction. It’s as though Mother Nature has realized that not the richest parent, not the most educated parent, not the most well-meaning parent in the world, can be expected to do a perfect job. What children do expect from us is unwavering love and devotion – through both the good and the hard times, through both the terrible two’s and the terrible teens! And that’s what we need to remember this Valentine season.

As you pause to reflect on the love you feel for your own children, we know you will appreciate the profound wisdom contained in these words from Lloyd deMause with which I close:

“The evolution of culture is ultimately determined by the amount of love, understanding and freedom experienced by its children... Every abandonment, every betrayal, every hateful act towards children returns tenfold a few decades later upon the historical stage, while every empathic act that helps a child become what he or she wants to become, every expression of love toward children heals society and moves it in unexpected, wondrous new directions.”

Happy Valentine’s Day—and Happy Signing!

Linda

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

Potty Training: What About Cognitive Readiness?

I've started out this year with a series of postings about potty training, a topic we here at Baby Signs care about so strongly that we've created a potty training program that incorporates signing in order to make it possible to potty train children at earlier ages. 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:
• Associate the need to eliminate with using the potty
• Understand simple instructions
• 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 an active role in potty training well before age 2.

Happy Signing (and don’t forget to follow us on Facebook)!

Linda

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

Potty Training: What Does “Ready” Really Mean?

Last week I talked about the trend toward later and later potty training and the role that the diaper industry has played in persuading parents that waiting is a good idea. After all, the longer children are in diapers, the more money they make! To help reverse this trend, we here at Baby Signs have developed a potty training program that uses signing to enable babies to signal the need to go long before they have words. In fact, our goal is to help parents get their children trained by age 24 – 30 months.

But are children “ready” that early? The question arises because 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 posting last week. 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 3-years-old.

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

Happy Signing (and don’t forget to follow us on Facebook)!

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. . . .

Linda

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

Maternal Depression

This week I'm taking a detour from talking about sign language for babies in order to address a very important topic: Maternal depression. Research shows that mothers who suffer from depression for extended periods during a child’s early years put their children at greater risk for emotional problems. There are many reasons for this greater vulnerability. One of them is the fact that depressed mothers are much less likely to engage in the lively face-to-face interaction that is so critical to helping babies feel secure and loved during their first year.

We know that the absence of this kind of interaction is upsetting to babies because of research by Professor Ed Tronick. In his classic study called “the Still Face” experiment, he first filmed parents and infants interacting face to face in whatever way was normal for them. After a bit of time had passed, the parents were instructed to assume a totally frozen face—neither smiling nor scowling—and remain totally passive and unresponsive to any bids for attention from the baby. The result? Babies as young as 4 months turned out to be exquisitely sensitive to the disruption and quickly become despondent when the disruption continued for more than a moment or two. Interestingly, the babies seemed to understand when Mom turned away to talk to someone else; it was when there seemed to be no good reason for the disruption that they became disheartened. Under those conditions, they seemed to perceive their mother’s behavior as rejection, and with that perception came the fear that they had lost their hold on a safe and predictable world.

As Professor Tronick points out, if a momentary “still face” in the laboratory can cause a baby to become despondent, just think what happens when such rejection occurs on a daily basis. Human babies crave interaction, and when it’s missing for long periods of time and they feel powerless to restore it, they become depressed too.

The research on the dangers of maternal depression has been pivotal in directing attention to the phenomenon of post-partum depression, a biologically-based reaction to giving birth that used to be considered totally psychological—that is, the fault of the mother—and treated with advice that inevitably made these new moms feel more guilty and more depressed. Fortunately, doctors now understand that post-partum depression is a real and serious phenomenon that needs attention.

Professor Tronick’s work, therefore, provides a good example of how research investigating the intricacies of development and the parent-child relationship often has profoundly positive effects on the lives of babies and their parents. That's research money well spent!

Happy Signing (and don’t forget to follow us on Facebook)!

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

A Cat by Any Other Name is Still a Cat…Sort Of

Every once in a while, I use my weekly blog to share stories that have come to us from parents who have enjoyed our Baby Signs® Program, each one illustrating how creatively babies use signs. The following story is another example, this time demonstrating that a baby’s use of signs often provides a window into how smart babies can be.

Sixteen-month-old Sara had learned a sign for CAT that involved stroking the back of one hand and arm with the opposite hand, all the way from finger tips to elbow. She used the sign a lot, her cat “radar” being in evidence as her mom read her books or took her for walks in the neighborhood. It’s amazing how many cats there are in the world once a toddler starts looking for them!

On one occasion, however, it wasn’t a full grown cat that caught her attention. In the local vet’s waiting room was a box with four kittens. These were the first kittens Sara had ever seen, and she was clearly fascinated. As usual, Sara turned to her mom to tell her, with a sign, what was in the box. But it wasn’t the usual CAT sign. Instead of a full swipe from finger tips to elbow, with a smile of wonder on her face, Sara substituted a tiny swipe just the length of her fingers. Her message? Big sign is to big cats as tiny sign is to tiny cats! In formal logic terms, an analogy!

Happy Signing (and don’t forget to follow us on Facebook)!

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