Welcome to the Go Diaper Free Podcast, where we're all about helping you stop depending on diapers as early as birth. I'm your host, Andrea Olson, author and mom of five ECed babies. This is episode 34: Sleep Causing a Potty Pause.
Today we have question from one of our listeners, Gwenn, from Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. But before I answer her question, I have another special surprise for you at the end of today's episode. In our last podcast episode, number 33, I shared a song about elimination communication. And seriously, if you haven't heard it already you have got to check it out. It is so adorable.
Today I'd like to share another song from Aly's album, Nipple Confusion is the name of the album, and I'll play it in full at the end of today's episode. I love supporting independent artists and I hope you enjoy this one. It's a bit of a giggle fest. All right, now for Gwenn's question.
“Hello, my name is Gwenn. I'm from Edmonton, Alberta, in Canada. I have a question regarding the potty training, because I had to do some sleep training with my six month-old baby girl, and now we are doing a super fun potty pause. So my question is, what is the best thing to do from here? How do I get back on track with it? Thank you.”
First off, Gwenn, darling, this is not easy. Things are going great with EC, then you improve your baby's sleep, and then because things have changed in the sleep department, EC goes off the rails. I think that all of us listening who have gone through a tough patch like this would agree that this is not easy and we are sending you beaucoup love. I also want to mention that I do have a podcast episode on getting back on track, which is episode 25, and one with a refreshing new perspective on potty pauses, episode 22. So check those out, I'll link to them in the show notes over at GoDiaperFree.com/34. I also teach a mini-course on both topics because they are extremely common, which I'll also link to over there.
But I just wanted to let you know why am I repeating if I've already done an episode on getting back on track and I've already done an episode on potty pauses. Well, this is unique because your question, Gwenn, blends the two together. How do you redirect a potty pause and get back on track? We're in a pause, how do we both get out of it and get back on the EC wagon at the same time?
So first thing's first. For all of those listening who have a problem with the phrase sleep training, I want to address that just right away. I want to point out that that does not necessarily mean cry it out. I do not advocate cry it out methods of sleep training and Gwenn isn't referring to this type of learning, either. She is referring to the very helpful and wonderful process of teaching your baby how to connect his or her sleep cycles through a variety of means, which is a gift to your baby and her temperament. So if you listening have a six month-old who is not sleeping through the night and you'd like to have that happen, which is not all of you, but some of you would like that to happen, if you do, just want to give you my best resource on this. Nicole at the Baby Sleep Site. I'll link to her over on the show notes at GoDiaperFree.com/34.
Anyway, Nicole's team wrote a custom sleep plan for me with my fourth baby, who was giving us hell around seven weeks old, would not sleep between the hours of 7:00 and midnight any day of the week, and it was driving us nuts. Their ideas solved the problem almost overnight without cry it out. So anyway, I just wanted to talk about that really quick first in case that triggered anybody, we are all on the same page.
All right, let's talk about potty pauses. What are they? Well, when your baby refuses to potty for more than a few days in a row, typically a week or more, that is called a potty pause. And why do they happen? Well, pauses can happen for a variety of reasons. In my book I talk about a whole bunch of them, but just to sum it up to a few, a big shift in the baby's environment like moving house or a divorce or travel, that can cause a potty pause. Or a big developmental milestone being reached, like behind the scenes, you don't know it's happening until after it's happened, of course. Like, "Gee, thanks a lot." New teeth pop up, you realize you've had a growth spurt, they started to crawl, they start to walk, they start to talk, all of that is about to happen and sometimes that can cause a pause.
And the third thing is, they really just don't want your help anymore with pottying and they're asking for full independence. So these are the primary reasons for potty pauses to happen, where your child will just resist the potty for weeks on end. And it can be miserable if you don't know how to get through it.
At six months old, Gwenn, I'd assume that this is about the new reality of sleeping through the night. Like you mentioned, your intuition is usually correct. This is definitely a milestone. Sleeping through the night is definitely a milestone, one that some people never, ever reach until their kid is like five years old. If that's you and you don't like that, please check out Nicole. Okay. I would wager that something else is probably also going on in the background that will obviously be revealed later after you get through it, but probably crawling, a growth spurt, new tooth coming in, changing to solids. All of this happens around that age, right? So it could be any of those things.
Regardless of what's causing the potty pause, and you have your intuition about that, here's how to get through a potty pause. This is for everybody who's going through a resistant period. The first part is you can do an optional reset. The second part is you can ease back in by using the four easy catches, and also the third part of this is relearning your baby's natural patterns through some type of observation. So here we go.
The first one is going through and doing a reset. This step is totally optional, you might have heard of me talking about it before, but if it's really bad and you and/or your baby are super stressed out, I want you to re-diaper for one to two weeks and do not do any EC. This is different from backing off and giving up completely, we're just taking a break. A genuine break. So if poops are easy and you already know when they happen and you don't have any resistance around those, go ahead and catch those during this break. Or if one time of the day is easy, say the mornings, and you never have any resistance then, just go for it. Keep doing the things that work. But really, I do not want you to do anything of your own accord EC-wise. If your child signals very strongly and says, and demands for you to take them, by all means take them. But as far as your participation in this, mom, I want you to take a break. Use the diaper as a backup during this time just to get reset, then we will move on to the next part here.
Whether you did the reset or not, you'll want to next ease back into EC for sure, and there are a couple ways to do that. The first way is to go back to only using one of the four easy catches at a time and building your way back up to using all four easy catches. Or use two of them that you feel comfortable using, or three, or all four. But the idea is to sort of baby step your way back in, so start with the one that is most appealing or that you know will be easiest to do.
We have the four easy catches are wake up and pee, the diaper change, poops, and ins and outs, transition times between in something or taking out of something. And if you want a refresh on those, those are in episodes 28, 29, 30, and 32, respectively. I'll link to those in the show notes as well at GoDiaperFree.com/34. Okay, so some like to do the easy catches one at a time. Get good at wake up pees only for a week, and then introduce diaper change pees for the next week. Then when baby is pooping when taking it out of the car seat, et cetera, you add in those easy catches, as well. Choose your most likely success and only focus on that for one to two weeks, then begin integrating the next one and the next one and so on. So after your reset, if you did that, or if you just aren't having that much stress and you just don't know how to get back on the wagon, just focus on one easy catch per week.
Okay, and then now to the last part here, relearning your baby's natural patterns through some sort of observation. Anytime you're getting back on track or you want to refresh or you feel out of connection or out of touch with what your baby's doing, you might want to do diaper-free observation time to relearn your baby's natural timing and rhythms. And I say relearn because it is constantly changing. You know that, once you learn it, then you're like, "Yes, I get it. I've got it. I'm good." And then it changes. So you can grab one of my observation logs, which is linked in the show notes for today's episode, and start timing when baby wakes up or when baby feeds, and measure the intervals for pee and poo from there. And you only want to do it upon waking or upon feeding, those are good pivot points.
This will give you an estimate of how often your baby needs to go, and you probably will stop offering at the times that your baby resists because she doesn't have to go. So you're kind of putting together the pieces of, "Why would I offer right now if I know that she usually takes 20 minutes after feeding to go?" This would be called a misguess. You learn from misguesses and you move on after a misguess, but you really need to take it in as information and not be so hard on yourself if you're not getting this, okay? Sort of zoom out and go, "Okay, I'm going to learn her timing. I'm going to see if I can learn anything from what I see here. Maybe I'll notice a signal, too. Bonus points. And now I know that she can actually hold it for 30 minutes at a time. Before I thought, oh wait, just a month ago it was 15 minutes." It probably was, but now she's grown and your over-offering at every 15 minutes instead of she's now at 30 minutes, is really causing a potty pause. So this could be part of the problem and part of the solution.
No matter what you choose to do, the four easy catches or observation time or both, and whether you do a reset or not, as things get better and better, before you know it you'll be back into a rhythm with your baby. You got to take baby steps, this is a tiny blip in the whole big picture. Remember, it's okay. There's no way to do this wrong. Awareness is what's important with EC, okay?
A couple of other things. If there is more resistance after your baby begins to walk, then it's time to teach all the building blocks of potty independence. So these are taught in-depth in my popular EC book, Go Diaper Free, which can be found at GoDiaperFree.com/thebook. This book will help teach you things that gradually hand off the baton to your child, which will greatly reduce resistance because they will have more control. Because if this crawling, walking child was living hundreds of years ago in a village setting with outdoor potty places and probably not very much clothing on, he would just mosey on outdoors, go potty, and return to his activity, right? So your involvement at these more independent ages can actually get in the way of their completion. They are totally ready to do it themselves, and if it weren't for these stinking clothes and that toilet that they can't climb onto, and you interfering with their rhythms, no offense, they would already be done and taking themselves and self-sufficient. So half the world's children in today's age are actually toilet independent by 12 months, and that is why.
Additionally, children between 12 and 18 months, if you didn't know, are in the sensitive period for toilet learning per Montessori frame of thought, so gradually wrapping it up during this period and ditching daytime diapers soon after they start to walk will divert most potty pauses from even beginning. So this is just a side note for everybody who's listening. And yay, we like to avoid potty pauses, right?
So Gwenn, I hope that this helps you both through the pause and that you'll get back on track with a lot of kindness and grace towards the both of you. And yes, I do mean you and everybody listening. You moms and dads need to have a lot of kindness and grace toward yourself when you're going through this difficult period. This is such a tiny blip in the big picture, you'll get through it soon enough, and looking back on it you'll be like, "Oh my gosh, that was just a month. We're fine."
Just don't give up. Don't fear that you're going to damage your baby or your relationship and guide the ship. You are the captain of the ship until your baby can do this thing herself. And believe it or not, she's looking to you to be unwavering in your guidance. Everything is information. Each misguess and every miss informs you. Just stick with it and be sure you're not showing your cards if you feel afraid. Poker face, you have that acting face on. If you're feeling afraid, your baby can sense that. And just know, this is what babies have done naturally for all of human history, so you're not doing anything wrong, you're just learning how to do something that nobody knows how to do in our culture today, which is all about diapering.
And just know that the Go Diaper Free community is always here for you if you hit a roadblock. See my book for access to that. Thanks again, Gwenn. We hope to hear how it's progressed since you sent in your question, and as I promised in the beginning of today's show, here is another track by Aly Halpert & Friends on their new album, Nipple Confusion, which you can find and purchase your own copy over at GoDiaperFree.com/Nipple. You'd be supporting an independent artist. I don't get a thing except for the satisfaction knowing that an independent artist is being supported if you go and visit their site. This track is about leg warmers, teeth, farts, cheeks, a blended Jewish family, and all the diapers that you never wear. I mean, who could possibly cover all of those topics in one song? You're about to hear it.
Please bring some joy into your day with “The Bear Song”, and please subscribe to this podcast before you go to be notified of future episodes and leave me a review. Every review helps more parents find EC, and that's important. Now for the music. Enjoy, and I'll see you next week on the Go Diaper Free Podcast at GoDiaperFree.com.
