Baby signals: stopping, starting + changing! – let’s dig a little deeper into EC signals today

Welcome to the Go Diaper Free Podcast, where we're all about helping you potty your baby as early as birth with elimination communication. I'm your host, Andrea Olson, author and mom of five adorable ECed babies. This is Episode 27, Baby Signals.

Today, we're going to talk about the thing that I get probably the most questions about overall with anything to do with EC, and that's baby signals. How do I know when my baby needs to pee, what if my baby doesn't signal, and how do I teach them to signal? So, we're going to cover all that today very briefly, first with what are the easiest signals to pick up on?

Well, the first one is any kind of shifting from being very active to not being active at all, or being very inactive then switching to agitation and activity. So, we see this a lot. With the various age ranges, I'll sort of go over what signals can look like for each of them. The easiest time to start EC is definitely at birth, so with a new baby ... I definitely demystify this because it sounds kind of overwhelming. I've just had a new baby, how could I possibly potty them?, et cetera. So, I get it. But I'm telling you, babies don't pee or poop that much during the first few days, and they're very, very vocal with their signals within the first three months of being born, during what we call the “4th trimester.” So, it's a really good time to get in tune with baby and to take advantage of when they do actually signal.

Usually, they'll stop signaling during the mobility phases, around four months, starting to roll over, and about five or six months, starting to want to sit up more and beginning to crawl. The signals just frankly go out the window at this moment. It's pretty normal, and it makes sense. If you think about it, if we were an intact culture where we have people living together in little villages, possibly in huts with mud floors, maybe the baby starts to crawl after being held and carried in a sling most of the time. Starts to crawl. Pee-pees on the floor. Mommy shoos the baby out of the hut, says, "No, no, no. Go outside where everybody else goes," and the baby begins to crawl and go and take themselves to where everybody else go to the bathroom.

It's like this cultural thing, that for hundreds of thousands of years, I am pretty certain human beings have done, and I've read accounts of it in various books like the Continuum Concept and Laurie Boucke's Infant Potty Training. There is a lot of evidence that this is the way things happened. So, it makes sense, you guys. If you think about it, at crawling, why would your baby tell you they need to go if they could just crawl outside and take themselves? Oftentimes, babies will crawl to the bathroom door, crawl to the potty, point or look at it, crawl to the door to outside and bang on it. I've seen all of this happen.

So, signals can definitely change when they start to get mobile, but oftentimes, they go away or they become pretty undetectable. The other reason is because babies are developmentally totally preoccupied with so many things and so much rapid development, that signaling to go to the bathroom kind of goes out the window, especially during learning how to crawl and stuff like that. This is all-consuming. We know when a baby's working a task, it is all-consuming. So, signals become less apparent at that time.

So, if you've lost signals, it doesn't mean that your EC stinks. It actually means that this is totally normal, and they will come back.

The most common signals at birth are going to be crying. Within the first three months, you're going to see ... A baby will cry out and look really uncomfortable and get really squirmy and wriggly and shift from being pretty content to being pretty not content. That usually happens pretty shortly after waking up or after nursing.

Usually, a surefire catch with a newborn is going to be when they wake up. Before you nurse, you potty them. They wake, you potty them. You nurse them, or you feed them if you're not able to nurse. And the first uncomfortable sort of shift after nursing is 100% of the time a signal that they need to go to the bathroom. Usually, you will catch something at that time. So, that's a really good signal for a newborn.

For a mobile baby, you've got, like I just said, moving towards the potty space or the potty. You've got shifting from one way of being to another, so active to really inactive. Staring off into space. Things like that. Something shifts, and you couple this with your knowledge of your baby's particular unique rhythms. “That looks like a signal."

There's also something during the mobile baby phases of 6 to 12 months where you've got signs replacing signals. So, the sign...How many of you know when your baby is pooping? I thought so. Whether you're doing EC or not, you're typically aware of when they're pooping, right? So, at that beginning sign of bearing down and grimacing, which is a very common signal or sign that they need to go, you can gently say, "Wait," take them off to the potty and have them finish there, if they have started at all. Sometimes, you'll see that sign before they've even really started to get it out, and you have plenty of time, and then they'll start to expect that you're going to take them.

Then we've got the young toddler stage, where they are beginning to walk. Oftentimes during that walking task, learning how to do that is all-consuming. So, after walking is a really good time to ditch diapers, and I'll go into that more in another episode...how and when to do that. But basically, you've got a child who has entered the Montessori sensitive period for toilet learning, and this is from 12 to 18 months. It's a great time to start EC and to wrap up EC, and if you've already been doing EC, it's a great time to wrap it up. Definitely veer on the earlier part of this timeframe, for sure.

So, with this period, the signal becomes the pee-pee dance that we see with two and three-year-olds who are potty training. You see that they will grab their crotch, grab their diaper, grab their underwear, grab their pants, grab their bottom, and maybe even start to undress, try to pull off their pants. That is a signal, definitely, and you’ll want to take them at that time.

During this time, you can teach them how to signal. You do this by consistency. When you prompt them to go, “it's time to go pee.” You can use sign language, which is your thumb in-between your first and second fingers, making a little fist with your thumb sticking out, and you shake it side to side. It's basically the letter “T” in American Sign Language - shaking it side to side means “toilet.” You can show them that, and you can say, "Pee-pee time," or "Pee-pee," or something very simple. If you use the same words and gestures or just moving to the toilet saying something that you want to become their signal eventually, and with this way of prompting consistently, they will eventually signal with whatever you teach them to signal.

So, it's just like when a child starts to throw a fit instead of saying "Help, please." I would say to the child, "Help, please," to give them a language for what they're experiencing. Well, when they show a pee-pee dance, and you think it's pretty clear that they need to go, then you want to give them the language for that. That becomes their signal so they can replace the whining with, "Help, please," or they can replace the crying with, "Up, please." - they want to be picked up. They can replace going in their pants with, "Potty," or "Pee-pee," or "Poo-poo," or whatever you choose to be their signal.

So, we can definitely teach them during the months of 12 to 18 months - it's a really good time to teach them to signal, and generally, you guys, signaling does come back into the picture at those ages. So, don't give up. Just because your baby doesn't signal doesn't mean that EC will not work.

I always teach, in my book and my website and everywhere I teach, The 4 Roads to Potty Time. They include:

• baby signals, if any
• natural timing - so, how often they go after waking or feeding
• your own intuition as the parent - so it crosses your mind, it occurs to you. Maybe you have a dream in the middle of the night that they need to go to the bathroom. That's intuition.
• and the fourth way is transition time. So, common times most babies need to go to the bathroom - when being taken out of the baby carrier, or you typically will want them to go before you go on a long road trip. Things like that. So, transition times are also a good way to do EC.
  

Baby signals is only one of four. If it doesn't work out, don't worry. Be committed to prompting consistently, teaching them their future signal word, and get to know the most commons signals. I do have the most popular ones listed out on my Easy Start Guide, which you can get at godiaperfree.com/start. It's a super low commitment, one-pager download that will teach you the basics so you can kind of wrap your head around what are the four most important parts of EC, how does this look, how does this work, how do I hold my baby. It's pretty awesome. Hope you'll go over there and grab it.

That's all I have to say about baby signals. All babies signal really well when they're born. Most babies stop signaling for a while, or it really drastically changes, and then when you've got a young toddler who you're wrapping things up with, you could totally teach them to signal in a way that you guys both understand the communication.

So, hopefully, that helps you to understand signals. I encourage you to do EC with or without them. Definitely join me next week, where we'll talk about another topic about elimination communication.

If you have any ideas of things that you want me to talk about, just shoot me an email at andrea@godiaperfree.com. I would love to hear what you want to hear on this podcast. Please subscribe on iTunes at godiaperfree.com/itunes. Definitely leave me a review, let me know how things are going, and if you have any ideas for future episodes, you could leave them there too. I check out all that regularly.

The show notes for this particular session will be found at godiaperfree.com/27, so anything I've mentioned as far as freebies and downloads and stuff during this podcast, you can go over to the website and check them out there. Leave a comment if you have a question. I love hearing from you.

That's it. This is the Go Diaper Free Podcast with Andra Olson, and I'll see you next week!