Our Common Enemy

Today we're going to talk about our common enemy. Did you know that we have one? And I'm going to tell you why and who exactly this common enemy is. Are you ready for this?

Hey, there, welcome to the Go Diaper Free Podcast, where we're all about helping you stop using diapers as early as birth. I'm your host, Andrea Olson, author and mom of babies, all EC from birth, all out of diapers by walking. This is Episode 165, Our Common Enemy.

On this podcast, we talk about Elimination Communication or EC. And my goal is to help you stop depending on diapers as early as birth and potty your baby with ease and confidence.

Today, we're going to talk about our common enemy. Did you know that we have one? But we all are doing EC or potty training and most of this early because we have a common enemy in this world. And our common enemy is this culture that we live in. And I'm going to tell you why and who exactly this common enemy is. Are you ready for this?

So this is what stands in the way of EC or early potty training success. We live in a diapering culture. This is all that you knew. So if you're having difficulty today with EC or with potty training, or early potty, training or whatever, or even with parenting to be honest, the reason is it's not your fault. It is not your fault that you're struggling. You are struggling because there are diabolical forces at play. I kid you not. This is no conspiracy theory.

And we live in a time where conspiracy theories are actually the reality and the reality is opposite day. So I think you and I are probably on the same page here. Our enemy is the big diaper companies. Cue the boos. Can we boo? Boo. Give a thumbs down in chat if you also can see this.

Now, I have met a very influential person who worked for Pampers for 35 years, held the patent for the newborn baby diaper that has the cutout down the middle. And he and I talked because I met him and I was like, "You worked for Pampers. You're the enemy." And I was kind of joking, but kind of not. So we met up and we had coffee here in Asheville and he told me everything, that they were just trying to please parents. That was their whole goal.

And then after I told him about EC, he said, "I need about five days. I can't even talk to you because you have blown my mind." And then five days later we got back together and he said, "I just realized that we've gone too far, as the diaper companies, we've gone too far." And you could see the regret in his face about the damage they've done to babies and moms, and their connection, and families, and the environment and everything else.

So we're going to go through this point by point because I believe, and I have a background in psychology, in depth psychology, Jungian psychology, I believe that when we shine the light on the negative and the dark, it becomes conscious. And then we are able to make conscious decisions based on that. I'm going to let you off the hook. It is not your fault if you didn't know how to do EC when you first started, if you started late or you think you started late. It is not your fault if you're finding yourself potty training or wrapping up EC and you feel like you don't know what you're doing. The right mindset can move mountains.

So in today's lesson, I'm going to talk to you about our common enemy. These enemies tell you to wait for readiness. Now, where did this come from? It came from a pediatrician. So you think that the enemy is the pediatricians, but it's not. The pediatrician, Brazelton, was hired by Pampers in the '60s and '70s to do a study on potty training. And his study, if you read it and I have a copy of it, oh my goodness, it'll blow your mind. It is not scientific at all. Basically it ends with his assumption that we should wait until a child says, "I am ready to potty train" to potty train.

And guess what? Because of this exquisite marketing, this big common enemy, the big diaper companies, have informed your pediatricians, have informed your mother-in-law, have informed all the potty training experts that have sprung up around the world to change our culture in two short generations and double and almost triple the potty training age.

So in 1957, 92% of our kids in America were potty trained, completely done by 18 months. Today's age is 36 to 38 months, can you imagine? And maybe you have a three year old right now. I have a potty training book for that, so don't suffer very long. But the thing is in the '60s when they were invented, nobody wanted to put their baby in paper. They didn't want to wrap paper around their baby's bottoms. So moms didn't want to buy their product. So what did Pampers do? Well, they hired a pediatrician to do a fake study and we all know there's a lot of fake science going on even today that's manipulating the masses.

That happened in the diaper companies back then and people started buying them. So I want to let you off the hook. It is not your fault if you feel like you're late to the game. If you're pregnant and you're learning about EC right now, you are the only one who's actually on time. But we can't make you feel guilty about this because it's not your fault. You have grown up in a diapering culture. So everything at Go Diaper Free is all about getting you out of diapers when you the parent are ready, and I've done it with my five babies from birth and they were all out of diapers by walking.

Again, with the right mindset, we can move mountains. So these enemies are going to tell you to wait for readiness. The talking heads of the diaper companies are your pediatrician, and your mother-in-law, and your neighbors, and the moms in the playgroup in town.
These enemies are going to tell you that your child has to speak, has to be able to recite their ABCs in order to be potty trained. Not true. They can be completely nonverbal. They're going to tell you, your baby has no sphincter control until 18 months old. Do you know that's in the textbook? My stepmom became a nurse, an RN a couple years ago. It is in her textbook. I looked it up.

And this is just misinformation. Babies are born with sphincter control. Mine were, and we have thousands and thousands anecdotally, which is more important. They haven't done a scientific study because nobody wants to actually reveal this information. They will lose billions of dollars if it's revealed. But everybody in my community who started at birth to like six months knows that there's sphincter control.

By the way, there's a study of 1,000 ECers that recently came out from one of our community members in Europe. And the average for all those 1,000 was six months. Within six months, they were all poop-trained. The average was six months old. So not six months of poop training, but six months of age. So that means, well, hello, we do have sphincter control. So why do the nursing manuals say 18 months? Good to know. Good to ask.

These common enemies will tell you to potty train with pull-ups, but pull ups are diapers and that's stupid. I'm just going to say it. They will also tell you to leave your baby in the same diaper for 12 hours. Have you seen those terrible commercials? I'm working on making some commercials that are not terrible, that are going to actually make fun of that because that's ridiculous. Nobody deserves to be pulling around a bag of waste for 12 hours, even a horse, no, in a parade. These common enemies are telling you that diaper rash is inevitable.

Well, diaper rash was very rare back in the early last century and the mid last century. Diaper rash now happens to, I think it's in the 90s percent of children get diaper rash. It is absolutely a problem that is only associated with wearing diapers. And then these enemies are going to tell you to let babies be babies. And they've got all these other moms being their talking heads now selling their products, selling more diapers. They're going to tell you, "Oh, just let your baby be a baby."

But if you think about that and you actually dissect it, you'll realize that babies weren't born with diapers on. Hello, what did people do before diapers? What did people do for all of human history? Well, the cave men and women certainly weren't just allowing their babies to pee and poop all over the cave or they would've had massive disease and they would've all died out.

We are mammals and our instincts and hormones lend ourselves to a partnership with our parents or our caregivers, and babies actually are born signaling that they want that diaper taken off to go to the bathroom. So if we want to truly do dissected and unpack that one, letting babies be babies actually means letting them not have diapers at all. Now, I use them for the first year because I'm a busy mom. But if we were to do this all naturale, babies are fully equipped to work with us for their hygiene. Super cool.

These enemies will also tell us that babies are passive recipients of our care. Passive recipients of our care means that they're dolls and we're just supposed to dress them and they don't participate at all until they can talk a couple years down the road. Well, those of you who are watching me right now know, and who are listening to me right now know that there is no way that your baby is passive. They are fully engaged from the beginning and eager to learn. They're so amazing.

These enemies will also say, and also are telling you, they tell you that early training or elimination communication will damage your baby psychologically. Let's think about that for a second. That would mean that all babies of all human history, every single one of them before about 200 years ago when cloth diapers were invented were psychologically damaged. Is that possible? No. No way and you know H-E-L-L, there is no way that that could happen. So that is just another soundbite meant to sell billions of dollars of more diapers.

I actually have a study on my website that talks to you about, well, it actually lists out, it's written by one of my coaches, Rebecca, in the UK, and it goes through all the different scientific studies. And every single one of them that shows damage to babies through potty training, they potty trained after two or three years old.

Anything before that, no studies show that they get damaged at all. And it just doesn't make sense when you actually think about it. It's just an excuse for us all to do the lazy thing, which happens to include buying thousands, oh, $3,000 worth of diapers per child. So I have saved 10,000 diapers over five children. Pretty good idea to do it. These common insidious enemies will tell you that your baby is 100% okay with pooping and peeing herself, that they don't have a preference either way, which when you look at your baby, after you catch that first pee or poop, you're going to know and you know for sure, there is no way that that baby ever enjoyed doing the other. They cried and cried and cried to get their diaper off. When I finally understood it, they're so happy now.

Our common enemies will tell you that this takes too much time. "You don't have time for that, mom." EC and early potty training takes something off of your plate though. Well, two things, you don't have to change endless poopy diapers, which takes a lot of time and surely maybe some of you do it mindlessly at this point because it's just wrote memory, but it takes less time to take your baby to the potty than it does to diaper and change them. It also takes way less time to deal with a child who has normalized behavior because once they're potty trained and they're done, with EC, we wrap it up between 12 and 18 months. We get to have a child who is centered and grounded and well behaved. And that's awesome. That's totally worth it.

Your common enemies will say, "You can't handle this. This is too much. You're already overwhelmed." They will want you to feel oppressed and depressed about being a new mom so that you don't feel empowered to do things yourself. Our common enemies will say, "You are weird if you do EC. You are weird if you potty train at 18 months." They will also say, "Not all babies can be pottied from birth."

"It'll work for your babies, Andrea, because you're the expert, but it won't work for mine." Well, I thought the same when I heard about it because I knew a amazing mom who never did EC because she couldn't figure it out. But if you know the right tools and the right systems like the ones that I teach and formulated, every single baby, including down syndrome babies, babies with autism that hasn't been diagnosed yet, all of these babies who are not necessarily neurotypical, EC even works for them.

I would have to say to you that all babies can be pottied from birth if you know what you're doing. And the last thing that our common enemies say to discourage us is that potty training and EC is not important. It's way more important to teach your baby math, or to teach your baby phonics, or to teach your baby how to set the table. It's ridiculous as that. But potty training and EC and early independence from diapers is actually the most important thing. Because with Montessori school of thought, once they finish that developmental stage from 12 to 18 months and they wrap it all up, which is exactly when they should be wrapping it all up and getting out of diapers, starting at 12 months, stop using diapers during the day, then they're freed up to learn everything else. It's magic.

What I want to tell you about these common enemies is that they are wrong. They have changed your and our parenting values to make billions of dollars off of your baby. And if that sounds insidious it's because it is. They have tripled the potty training age, doubled to tripled in two generations. Nobody wanted paper diapers. They invented a scientific report that BS everybody into believing that they should use them so that they could get out of the house and work. Sure, that was very helpful. Look at me, I work, I'm actually in my house, but I work.

But nobody wanted paper diapers for their babies. They thought that it would be bad to leave them like, "Oh, cloth diapers, you just take them out when they're walking and we're all good. We don't need your product." The diaper companies convinced them, "You're going to damage your baby if you don't."

They are the enemy and you didn't know any better. And now that you know better, we're going to talk about full permission granted to do the right thing by your baby and to parent your way even if it's different from your neighbor, and different from your pediatrician's desires, and different from your mother-in-law's desires. If you are mad about being manipulated, then it's time to take action. If you're like, "Oh, that's kind of nasty, it leaves a bad taste in my mouth" then it's just time for some action.

And with EC, it doesn't have to be all or nothing. With potty training, it does. That's easy to do. If you're 18 months, just wrap it up. So here's my action item for you guys today. Get my free Easy Start Guide at get.godiaperfree.com/start. If you are potty training, then get my three free day potty training primer to get you in the right mindset.

And that you just go to godiaperfree.com and just click on the right age there and you'll see it there. These are both free. What I want you to do, especially if you're doing EC because that's my primary audience, is to try one easy catch. Catch that morning pee, catch that poop, get something right after you take them out of the car seat, or the high chair, or the baby carrier. Something like that. Try one easy catch. Do it at a diaper change because a lot of times, especially baby babies, little babies, hold it till you take off the diaper.

And then I want you to message me on whatever platform you're watching this on, or comment or whatever, or wherever you're listening, if you're listening to the podcast, for example, leave a review and say, "I caught my first potty." Do that for me. I cannot wait.

And yeah, good luck with your first catch. My goal today is to get one pee in the potty if you've never done that before. All right, are you ready to do it? Awesome.

Thanks so much for listening. This is the Go Diaper Free Podcast at godiaperfree.com. We'll see you next time.