Woman's Hour - Parenting: Potty training

Episode Date: May 15, 2019

Potty training over the weekend? From birth? What are the fads and what really works? Jenni is joined by Rebecca Mottram, a children’s nurse who now runs her own business teaching potty training and Christina Hardyment, author of Dream Babies, to try to work out the dos and don’ts and what has changed over the generations.

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BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hello and welcome to this week's podcast for parents. Now who knows what will be expected of little Archie Harrison when it comes to potty training. All we know thus far is that his father's been changing nappies, which suggests he won't be going through the latest trend, which is to hold a baby from birth over the toilet and have them out of nappies from the get-go. What does work best with least anxiety for the parent and the child, and how have trends changed over the years? Well, Rebecca Mottram is a children's

nurse who runs her own company specialising in potty training. Christina Hardeman is an historian and the author of Dream Babies. When was potty training first introduced? Well, it was right there in the very first manuals. It was taken for granted that you would start straight away with potty training. And what the baby did was lie across the lap and you'd have a tiny potty underneath it, be quite comfy, and you'd make encouraging noises potty underneath it be quite comfy and you'd make encouraging noises and that sort of thing there was a strong belief in habits and getting

used to routines and training not least because of course they didn't have disposables they had all sorts of other horrible things they had to wrap around their baby's bottoms to keep them dry. And when was this? In what period? Certainly in the 18th, end of the 18th, well, probably the manuals began at the beginning of the 19th century and the Dr Spock of the Victorians was Pi Henry Chavasse, who was still having editions printed in 1940s, just before the very first Dr Spock manual. And he was very influential, his advice to mothers manual and he was very influential his advice to mothers

and he was very keen on this regularity he was also very kind-hearted and the truth about poppy training as with all child care manuals is you have kind of disciplinarian people and very tender-hearted people which is quite well suited to different characters of parents. Now Rebecca I know you teach from birth elimination which is a big title for I think holding the baby over the toilet what does it actually involve? Hi yeah so people call it elimination communication which is quite a ridiculous name really I just tend to call it baby pottying because that kind of makes sense to me um and basically it's about thinking that when you're you know all babies are going to wee and poo whatever we do we can't really prevent that so it's kind of thinking about a different way of managing that so it is it is like Christina described and you literally hold your

baby over something else that's not an appy so but I think a really common misconception is that people who do this nowadays don't use nappies and that's not really the truth and certainly both my children use nappies as well and you know we have very busy lives and and it's difficult to to do that for every single wee or poo so it's more a case of of learning about when when you know that they will do it and and helping them some of the time to do it outside a nappy but you see my understanding is that some people do do it without nappies and then i will how do you judge when your child your tiny baby needs to go to the toilet there's a very good thing called grunt and run i believe you take the uh you notice what the baby

is doing and of course it does require close attention and pretty full-time close attention from a parent and that is in a sense why the whole thing went out of fashion because women were doing all sorts of other things and then they discovered disposable nappies so why try at all? But it does seem to be coming back into fashion, Rebecca, doesn't it? Yeah, it's definitely back in fashion for lots of different reasons and what Christine is saying is right

you do have to give a bit of extra attention but if we think about the way that we normally think about how babies communicate to us that they're actually very good at telling us things and all sort of new mothers learn to recognize the difference between and when a baby's crying because they're tired or when they're hungry and actually learning about their elimination it's a similar kind of level of awareness and it doesn't have to be something that you do all the time. You can very much do it just some of the time. So most people will probably have recognized their own child's poo face.

I know I did with both of mine. It's fairly obvious when they were pooing. And a lot of people now just try to do it for the poo because it's actually much easier to poo when you're being held in that position um i mean i don't know how many people have ever had to or tried to poo lying down but it's actually quite difficult um and and when you hold your baby um in a way over a potty or something it becomes much easier so it's not as difficult as people might think it is um and it certainly has a lot of benefits christina I know you were born

in 1946 and I don't suppose you remember what happened but you may have spoken to her about it what method did your mother use? Well I'm pretty sure it's what was in the mothercraft book which is Mary Stokes's sorry Mary Tooby King's book and that was very formal routines um but that the same year was i was born dr spock began to come out so when i was bringing up my own four daughters um i was actually doing the big terry nappy thing and there you were in did encourage them to get on a pot fairly quickly because it was such hard work washing the nappies i remember my husband washing them in a mountain stream when we were on holiday. But I think a big incentive now, having had this age of comfort disposables, where babies in fact can't feel if they're wet.

So those signals that Rebecca was talking about are much less apparent. In some ways, it'd be something to be said to go back to nappies where the baby felt a bit uncomfortable and got nappy rash and to what extent christina would you say that concern for the environment and the disposable of disposable nappies is starting to change things i'm sure that is should certainly should be behind it because the the situation where they're making pampas and nappies in bigger and bigger sizes, I believe there's even a nine-year-old one, and it does seem that we cannot throw, as we do now, eight million disposable nappies a year in the UK alone into landfill because even if they're supposed to be biodisposable, there's a big question mark over that. And so I think it's a

thoroughly good thing that we should start thinking about ways of things. But at the same time, as with all bringing up babies, you've got to make them suit your life and not let them, in a sense, run you. So your lifestyle may require one thing and the baby another. If you can afford a nanny, a trained nurse or whatever, then that's fine and dandy. But one has to be realistic, I think. Rebecca, what sort of problems might a child have if a parent is, let's say, too domineering about it,

you know, puts you on the potty, insists that you do something, gets cross if you don't, or if parents start too late? And what would you consider too late yeah it's a really good question I think if we if we just go back a little bit that if we think about other things that we do with babies like we use high chairs or we put them in a baby bath or we put them in a car seat and we don't really make a big deal out of any of those things you know we just we teach

our babies that this is what happens in this place and that becomes completely normal to them and I think we can kind of approach potty pottying in the same way that we just kind of make it a normal part of their life and I think that that massively helps when it comes to potty training later on because obviously a very young baby is not going to be able to manage without nappies on their own there's not as much independence possible until they're a bit older and generally it's kind of agreed from about 18 months and onwards that some independence can be can be had and I think if when you approach potty training from that point if they've already had the the experience of sitting on a potty and using a potty sometimes and the potty training process becomes much easier.

And that's quite important, really, because most people will start potty training when their child's a toddler. And generally nowadays it's around two and a half to two and a half to three. And that's really anyone with children will know. That's a really difficult time because children will be very resistant to being told what to do. And so the more normal it already is for them, the easier that process is. I was talking to Rebecca Mottram and Christina Hardiman, and we had lots of response from you on the email. Jennifer said, I've just heard the introduction to the programme

about the new idea of potty training. There's nothing new about this. I was potty trained from birth 73 years ago and my three children, now 53, 52 and 43, were potty trained in the same way, being held over a potty immediately after a feed

with total success. Cathy said, my mother and aunt did this when they were working as children's nannies in Ireland in the last century. As linen was scarce, they only had three linen nappies for each child, one to wear, one to wash and one drying. This would be viewed as very environmentally friendly now, no waste. With the clear incentive to get babies out of nappies as soon as possible, it's obvious to get them used to the potty right from the start. When you change a baby's nappy, the baby often weaves anyway, so why not capture urine in the potty? And Dr Pragya Agarwal said so much pressure to potty train as if it's some sort of measure of our

ability as parents. I've been putting it off and hoping that it would just happen. And Claire said I did elimination communication with my four month old Flora. She's now eleven. She associated hand signals and sound with

going to the potty. Proud of pics of her on her little potty next to my son, then two. It was all great, and I had a routine established, could sometimes even go out in towelling pants. However, I went back to work when she was a year, and the nursery were unable to continue the routine, and it all went to pot. Pardon the pun. Well, thank you for all your responses to today's podcast for parents. Don't forget, we're always looking forward to hearing your ideas. If there's something you would like us to discuss, do let us know for today. Bye-bye. I'm Sarah Treleaven and for over a year, I've been working on one of the most complex stories I've ever covered.

There was somebody out there who was faking pregnancies. I started, like, warning everybody. Every doula that I know. It was fake. No pregnancy. And the deeper I dig, the more questions I unearth. How long has she been doing this? What does she have to gain from this?

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