How we can respect our children’s desire for mastery…

by practicing EC or early potty training.

If you, like me, follow a gentle and respectful parenting approach you may be confused about whether Elimination Communication falls into this category or not. After all, the two most popular gentle & respectful parenting guides in the US and the UK (Sarah Ockwell Smith and Janet Lansbury) are not big fans of EC (but what I’ve found is that they have a very superficial understanding of it).

But what could be more respectful than responding to all of our babies’ non-verbal cues? And with everything that’s happening around the world today, isn’t it time we looked outside our own narrow cultural perspectives and be more open-minded about what is normal in other cultures?
 
When my daughter was born 2.5 years ago, I noticed that the original attachment parenting book (Jean Liedloff’s The Continuum Concept) mentioned the Yequana Indians of Venezuela practicing EC. I weighed up the pros and cons and took the plunge when she 10 weeks. I never looked back. After all, 75 countries around the world today don’t use any nappies or use very few – and disposables are still a luxury in a lot of places.
 
What about potty training? Again, the gentle parenting world is awash with “potty training is disrespectful, unnecessary, stressful, harmful….”. Sarah Ockwell S. thinks children are not emotionally ready and physically ready at the same time (which may be true – babies are physically ready at around 12 months, so perhaps that’s a bit early for our Western standards). There are lots of proponents of the “wait it out” and do nothing approach. Which wouldn’t be a bad thing at all, if we weren’t putting our children at greater risk of UTI’s, constipation, soiling and wetting (which increase by 25% after 3 years).
 
What if our children were actually telling us much earlier that they were done with nappies – earlier than they can talk? Did your toddler suddenly go through a phase of actively resisting nappy changes – anywhere between 12 and 16 months? Or did you notice they showed interest in the toilet at around 16 – 18 months? What if that was their way of saying “I’m done with nappies” but we just didn’t follow through or thought it was too early? If your toddler showed interest in brushing their teeth for two weeks and then lost interest, would you simply allow them to stop doing it until they verbally asked to do it again?
 
After all, brushing their teeth is in many ways similar to using the toilet – there are hygiene and health implications, it’s a life-long skill and ideally, we want our children to want to do it for themselves, even if we sometimes have to find creative ways to convince them to do it (see my previous blog post on this topic).

I strongly believe that the gentlest thing to do with a toddler aged 16  – 24 months is to give them the opportunity to have full control and mastery over their bodily functions. This used to be the first thing they had control over! Full-time diapering is a choice we made for them and it’s up to us to give them the opportunity to stop using them. Most likely until this point, they haven’t had a chance to experience what it feels like to pee or the difference between wet & dry/clean (unless you’ve practiced EC).

The key is NOT to make it our agenda – we place our trust in our children to be able to do it at their own pace and we trust our parenting skills by removing the nappies and gently guiding them through it. Allow them to take control of the process and be there to support that.
 
Because the gentlest thing to do, with all humans, is to give them the opportunity to be dry and clean – even animals do not soil themselves, so why would we think our children are any different?