Potty Training vs Developmental Leaps
Lisa "Dee" Perusse, our certified coach in Montreal, Quebec. Some links here may earn her a referral commission. We only refer to products or services we’ve actually tried and think are super useful, because we’re practical and helpful like that. :) ALSO, because these are tough times, financially, there’s a discount code if you scroll all the way to the end! :)
Developmental leaps. Let’s talk about them.
Our babies go through new ones every few weeks in their first year of life. Remember when your little one had a really fussy week, then miraculously chilled out, but now all of a sudden, they found their toes with their fingers?? When my little ones were babies, I remember marvelling at this process.
It was almost as if they were installing new software.
The system was a little glitchy while the software was being installed, but then had brand new programs once the installation was over.
As a first time parent who hadn’t even heard of EC, I relished observing this process. I also took comfort in it when my baby was going through a really fussy time. Those periods can feel endless, so observing them through the lens of “software installing” really helped me weather these phases.
However, with my second baby, I had learned about EC and wanted to start from birth. I was so fascinated to notice how these phases lined up with EC and potty training.
If you start EC from birth, you’ll find that for the first little while, you are 100% in charge.
Some time around 2 months, baby will start to notice patterns. This really helps them move to a phase of EC where they understand that they are being held a certain way, and will have the opportunity to use the potty in a moment.
Around 4-5 months, they’ll develop the capacity to understand more about sequences of events. At this point, they might be able to notice that when they make a certain face or noise, their parent responds by picking them up, holding them over the toilet/potty and making a cue sound that helps them know to release their pelvic floor.
Of course, they are also wiring up all sorts of other software at this time - learning to roll, coping with a new sleep landscape (or, what some people call “the 4-month sleep regression”). During this phase, EC might go off the rails. The system might glitch while these software programs install themselves. A baby who has previously been really easy to read might surprisingly have stealth pees at random times.
You might think to yourself “why isn’t EC working for me right now?”
Famously, while babies are learning to crawl and walk - which takes a lot of work for them physically and mentally - they tend to change the EC game on you! They might even resist the potty during this time because they are basking in their newfound skills and independence and are pissed to be picked up and moved to the potty when they had goals and plans of their own!
This is really normal.
Some parents, unfortunately, view this phase as “the end of EC” / “it just doesn’t work anymore” when truly it’s just a big set of physical and developmental changes taking place. EC changes as your baby grows up. One of the most beautiful things about EC, in my humble opinion, is that it encourages us to continually get to know our babes as they grow and change, and respond to their changing needs in new ways.
My own now-4-year-old has even gone through some developmental leaps in the time since he’s been potty-independent. We “passed the baton” just before 2 years old when he told me “no diaper!”. Since then, his leaps will manifest themselves as wetting the bed. He is dry at night 98% of the time, but every so often, he goes through a week where he pees the bed every. single. night.
At first, I wondered what was going wrong - was I just being lax? We tried all the typically suggested things, like limiting fluids at night, insisting on the before-bed-pee, etc. but none of these things seemed to have an effect. Then, spontaneously, he’d stop peeing the bed and manifest some kind of new skill.
After a few of these phases, I noticed the correlation. My speech-delayed love bug peed the bed every night for a week and just as I was about to scream over how much laundry I was doing, he stopped peeing the bed and started using expressions in his speech.
You know when a workplace IT manager asks for the computers to be shut down at night for maintenance?
Yeah, that. His system was updating itself during offline moments. As he has grown up, these weeks have spaced themselves out more and more. As of now, they are quite rare. Recently, he even sat up in the night and asked to be taken to the bathroom - something he had never done before. I guess his brain wired up a new program where he can tell if his bladder is full while sleepy 🤷🏻♀️
All this to say that - I consult with potty training parents often who are stumped as to why their kid - who is usually accident-free and totally independent - is going through some kind of potty regression.
And though developmental leaps are not the only reason our children’s brains might de-prioritize EC and potty training, I think it’s worth examining whether that’s the case before we stress ourselves out over a few accidents/misses. Absolutely, sometimes there’s age-appropriate resistance, trauma, power struggles, big life transitions, and even medical reasons.
But I’d say a big chunk of those times, it’s probably just a re-wiring of the brain to be able to run new software.
Knowing this has helped me accept the moments where pottying goes sideways. I can tell myself that my baby’s brain is installing new software and that the current software might run slowly, glitch, have problems loading, etc. It’s much easier to power through this “routine maintenance” when you know you’ll have new programs to use once it’s over!
