The Nature of “Assisting” Babies with the Toilet

Hey there, welcome to the Go Diaper Free podcast. I'm Andrea Olson, your host, author, and mom of five babies - all ECed from birth, all out of diapers by walking.

This is episode 199, The Nature of Assisting Babies with the Toilet: Montessori Ideas for Elimination Communication. You can find the show notes over at godiaperfree.com/199. Leave a comment, ask a question there, and also see the links to all the things mentioned in today's show.

Assisting babies with the toilet is a Montessori concept. I want to read a couple of quotes to you from Maria Montessori herself to start off this topic. If you haven't looked into Montessori at all, I highly recommend a book called Montessori from the Start. That'll give a nice little in intro to Montessori. But EC is very much in alignment with Montessori, although we start (pottying) earlier.

In 1946, Maria said, "We must help children from the very beginning. We must give them the right environment, because they have to adapt themselves to a strange new world." Potties are not natural, going to the bathroom on a potty is not natural. But wanting to go, not on your caregiver, not on yourself, not in your bed, is 100% natural. Setting up the environment for success (giving them “the right environment”) includes using the right potties. If you don't have them, please visit me at tinyundies.com. You need the environment set up for ease of helping the child help themselves.

Another quote from Maria: "To give our children a fine start in life, we must see that their surroundings satisfy their need for activity and development, remembering at the same time that our own part is not that of instructor and interferer, but of helper." Again, we're assisting our babies by doing EC training, with something that they can't do by themselves, until they can do it by themselves. And even then, we're still assisting a little bit more, as needed, of course. But we're not the interferer and we're not the instructor, we are the helper. We're helping to aid the natural instincts for independence in this.

Another one, "The adult must not interfere, must not act instead of the child. Give him the means and let him act. His freedom consists of this." So Maria was very much about freedom; I'm the same kind of person. I love my own freedom, my children to feel free, and also not doing things for my kids that they can do themselves.

There's one little exception to this. I've been reading the Five Love Languages for Children, and I do have a couple of children who, their love language is acts of service, so sometimes they're like, "I can't put my shoes on." And I'm like, "You're seven. Yes, you can." They just want me to show them I love them, so I put their shoes on and then they feel filled up. So, that’s a little bitty thing I wanted to insert there, but the general principle is, give him the means and let him act. Because if we do everything for our children when they're capable of doing it themselves, we are robbing them of the opportunity to live and breathe in an autonomous manner. Then, they're dependent on us, and when we send them off when they're 18, 20, whatever, they can't function and we wonder why. So we want to not act instead of the child.

Maria says, "The child sees the same action repeated at the same time every day in the same way. This attracts his attention. Children have a sense of the succession of activities in time. It is like a muscular memory, a memory of movement and of time." This is from the 1946 London Lectures, Page 131, and oh my goodness, doesn't that resonate with what we're doing with EC?

Even doing just the four easy catches, (or whichever we choose to offer if we’re going part-time EC, as most people do) is the same action repeated the same time and the same way every day. This does attract their attention. “I’m going to offer the potty at wake-ups,” or “I'm going to offer it every diaper change,” or “when I see the signal for a poop” or “before putting them in or taking them out of something.” My board book, Tiny Potty, talks about the whole routine. This succession of activities really attracts our children. It builds their muscle memory and it's really great for them.

The next quote is, "We must give him the means and encourage him. Courage, my dear, courage." “Encourage” means giving someone courage. "You are a new man that must adapt to this new world; go on triumphantly. I am here to help you." This kind of encouragement is instinctive in those who love children, which is all of you. Encouraging is different from rewarding or coercing or persuading. Encouraging is giving them the courage by giving them the means: setting up the environment for them, being intentional, and having repetition in your movements and your timing. Also loving on them by wanting them to succeed and showing them that with what we're doing, "I am here to help you." I love that.

And the next one is, "Imitation is the tool given by nature to children to help them adapt to the particular place where they were born." So, their culture, their state, country, city, whatever. "And that enables them to adapt to the customs of their specific environment." I live in the United States, in Asheville, North Caroline. Here we use toilets, we wear clothes, we wear underwear. So, what does my child need to know to live in this environment? I'm going to teach partially through imitation, or “modeling,” and my children imitate what I model. That helps them with adaptation.

As EC becomes a little bit more accessible to more people in the mainstream, more people seem to criticize EC as “coercive” or “too early” or not “honoring” that “a baby is a baby” and all these other soundbites. But EC is not just pure training like, “You have to do this." It's helping our children adapt to the environment in which they live, where we use toilets and we wear clothing. None of us - no mammals - wears their toilet. This is a new thing for children, human children.
The last quote I want to share before I review this is, "The child does not work in order to move, or in order to become intelligent. He works to adapt to his environment. It is essential that he has many experiences in the environment if he is to do this." So the child does this work (Maria always calls the child's work, "work"), in order to adapt. And it's essential that children have lots of chances to practice, whether it results in a pee in the potty or not. That's just a little bit from what she has to say about assisting babies with anything, and what we're talking about today is the toilet.

(Speaking of “many experiences” and practice, a lot of you mentioned that you have trouble with consistency, and episode 166 on my podcast totally talks about dealing with your own inconsistencies with EC. I have wonderful solutions there to get you back on track. We all fall off the wagon!)

Again, we are not potty training, we are assisting and helping our children adapt to their culture. We are not their instructors, although sometimes we do teach them things regarding the toilet. And we are not interfering in the processes. I talk a lot about giving privacy and how to do that. We really want to support. We are their helpers. We want to assist by setting up the environment for success.

In my new version of my book, Go Diaper Free, there's a photo gallery of all of these different potty stations. I also have that in my Movers + Shakers program (coming soon). That’s so you can see, visually, all the different potty stations that are possible. How to have everything there, everything kid-size, everything accessible and reachable, and nothing that they shouldn't be messing with near them.

We want to assist by believing in them, too, by having this mindset and attitude towards our babies that they are capable. They are capable, and we know this because, in 1957, 92% of babies and toddlers in the United States were finished with toilet training by 18 months old. Now, that has over doubled because of the diaper companies. Clearly, they have done a great job marketing disposable diapers and convincing us to wait and wait and wait (and keep using diapers).

When we realize that “waiting” is not natural and “letting babies be babies” doesn't really add up, we realize that babies are born capable. They are born capable, and we don't need to “wait for readiness.” The “scientific studies,” (supporting delayed toilet independence) have missing data - and they were also done by Brazelton, who is the pediatrician at the head of the University of Pampers. Do the math!

We need to reset our mindset and our attitude from what the culture thinks, to this attitude of, "My baby is totally capable of this", and believe in our babies. All babies, before disposable diapers really took over in the '60s, and really before cloth diapers a couple 100 years ago, were pottied in this way, which therefore means that all of them are capable. We just have to learn as the parents, and that's where I come in, and will help you with that.
We want to assist our babies, as their helper, by showing them how to do the whole routine, also by showing them how to be in this world, by being ourselves. We use a toilet, we use clothing, we do this and that. We use repetition, with taking them to the potty, even if it's just one time a day that you can be consistent. We assist them by prompting and reminding them in a nonverbal way.

Many years ago, I spent some time in Africa. They didn't really talk about anything with their babies much. They acted and did things with their babies. These moms were amazing. You could tell they were pros. They would take their baby, in nonverbal ways, and just take care of things, and these babies were totally happy. I was only 20, mind you, so that was my unscientific analysis of the situation, but I did notice that there was a lot of nonverbal communication. Watch the documentary called Babies, and you’ll see other cultures talk way less than we do, in America, at least.

The last thing is, we want to be their helpers by assisting them, by wiping and helping them to pull their pants up and down, until they can do it on their own, and by demonstrating how to do that, including how to mount the potty. All of that is in my Passing the Baton program (coming soon) for 12 to 18 month olds. In that program I include the Isadora Teaches video library. It's a private video series of when my daughter was three years old, teaching your child how to get on and off the potty, how to pull pants up and down. It's a really popular series for all of the book owners who have the Tiny Potty Training Book. I've also included it in the Passing the Baton program (coming soon) because between 12 and 18 months is really a good time to start teaching those things, and that is one way we can assist them.

For perspective on this teaching vs. assisting concept, remember, we’re not just teaching them math out of the blue at two years old. Instead, we are teaching them how to do part of a process that they're trying to master already. (That’s why we refer to it as “helping” or “assisting”.) So, there you have a little bit of assisting babies with the toilet, a la Maria Montessori. I hope you found that very helpful!

Please let me know, have any of the topics today regarding Montessori + EC resonated with you? Do you have any questions? Go over to the show notes at godiaperfree.com/199 and leave us your comment there. I look forward to discussing with you, there!

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