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Potty prodigies

They can't eat solids. They can't sit up on their own. But these infants can use the toilet.

By KATHERINE SNOW SMITH
Published May 28, 2005

	[Times photo: Keri Wiginton]
	Katherine Abbey, 29, steadies her 7-month-old son Jason, who is close to reaching a childhood milestone that usually comes at a later age: potty training. “All I have to do is sit him on the potty and he knows what he’s supposed to do.”

Seamus Fitzpatrick woke up from his nap and looked around the room sleepily. His mother took his cloth diaper off and placed him on a small, white plastic potty. Within a minute the sound of urine hitting plastic could be heard. Mission accomplished.

At 10 weeks old, he is too young to sit up on his own or to eat solid foods, but he's about to outgrow diapers.

"On a really successful day we can easily cut the (number of) cloth diapers we use into a quarter," said his mom, Laura Fitzpatrick of Land O'Lakes. She was one of five moms who turned out last month for the first meeting of the Hillsborough County Diaper Free Baby support group.

A growing number of books and Web sites are prompting parents to start potty training early. Really early. Enthusiasts recommend parents start placing their babies on a potty during their first week of life. Author Laurie Boucke even offers advice for so-called "late starters" who don't get going until their babies are the ripe age of 6 months.

The idea is to watch your baby's squirms and facial expressions and learn the timing of her bowel movements and urination. Place her on the potty often (some try it every half hour or 45 minutes) and make the same noise - for example, "sssssssss" - every time she goes. In time, when the child hears that sound or is placed on the potty, she will know it's time to relieve herself.

Most children using this method are potty trained by the time they are 12 to 18 months old; the average child in the United States is potty-trained at a little over 2 years.

"The potty was difficult to use with a newborn, but once he could hold his head up it worked better," said Katherine Abbey, organizer of the support group. "We often used the sink when he was a newborn."

At the meeting, Abbey sat on the floor of her home in a Riverview subdivision, offering tips and advice to the moms who had responded to fliers she had posted. (A similar group meets in Orlando. Pinellas County doesn't have one yet.)

Abbey held her 6-month-old son, Jason, in a sling draped across her chest while her 4-year-old son, Jefferson, played around the house.

Jason is usually diaper free around the house. "But if I'm having a stressful day and can't keep track of it, the diaper goes on," Abbey admitted.

Some parents keep a journal to try to track bathroom patterns. Some communicate with their babies using sign language. A fist with the thumb between the first two fingers means "potty."

Abbey said she and her son started communicating when he was a week old. By three months he could make the "sssssssss" sound and grunt when he urinated or had a bowel movement.

"Now that he's older all I have to do is sit him on the potty and he knows what he's supposed to do," she said.

"We say "aaaahhhh' for pee. For poop we just add a little grunt to that," Fitzpatrick said. She learned about diaper-free parenting on the Internet when Seamus was about 8 weeks old. "Disposable diapers are just a waste."

Infant potty training devotees point to Europe, China and Africa, where for centuries babies start training under a year. In the United States, the average age for potty training is 27 months.

Child rearing books in the late 19th and early 20th centuries instructed parents to sit their young babies on a chamber pot at regular times each day. But the practice fell out of favor in the 1930s when some parents became too strict in their tactics, going so far as to strap babies into potty chairs.

In the 1960s Dr. Benjamin Spock advised parents to wait until their children were at least 12 months to potty train them, but felt they would be more ready at 18 to 24 months.

Revised and updated editions of his book strongly advise against any training efforts in the first year, saying babies who have been conditioned early are "more apt to rebel later through prolonged soiling or bed-wetting."

Spock's influence created an opportunity for makers of disposable diapers, who had an eager market in mothers tired of washing cloth diapers. But for the small number of parents using cloth today, infant potty training is making a resurgence. Many devotees also practice attachment parenting, holding their children next to them in a sling for much of the day so it's easy to see and hear the cues that let them know it's time to potty.

Plenty in the medical field don't endorse infant potty training.

"You'll save on diapers but I don't know of any evidence that in the long run it will make a child more successful or happier," said Mark Wolraich, a doctor at the University of Oklahoma medical school who wrote Guide To Toilet Training for the American Academy of Pediatrics.

"You can really work at training kids so they can achieve toileting earlier but it's a long process. It comes much more quickly when they are developmentally ready to do it," he said. "You are conditioning the baby but the child still has to develop the awareness and control to do it on their own."

Wolraich believes that getting your child trained a year or so earlier has to be weighed against how much time and effort is needed to get there. He worries if a lot of families start trying infant potty training, the parents won't have as much time to enjoy their babies.

"The kids can get frustrated and it ends up being more of a detriment to the parent-child relationship," he added.

Alicia Norris, a St. Petersburg mother of two, said potty training her son early made her feel more in tune with him.

"It really connected me to them. I stayed more present," she said. "I think it's just an instinct that we lost touch with. It's like, why would we train them to go in their pants when we have to retrain them not to? It doesn't make sense."

She started training her daughter, Anavey, at 18 months and she was done when she was about 2. She started putting her son, Dakota, on the potty when he was around 3 months old and he was fully trained before he was 18 months. Anavey is now 6 and Dakota is 3.

"It sounds like it would be harder, but I cloth-diapered, so I was doing much less washing," Norris said. "Most of the time he went around without diapers, but I put a diaper on him when we went somewhere." At first she used diapers at night but after a while she let Dakota sleep naked and put puddle pads under him.

"If I was at home, we wouldn't go through any diapers. There were some accidents on the floor, but I had hardwood floors and tile so it didn't bother me," Norris said. Accidents were actually productive. She and her son cleaned them up together and he learned more than if the urine just ended up in his diaper and he never actually saw it.

"I'd like to get started and move it along," said Nita Frazier, who brought her 1-year-old son, Zachary, to the diaper-free baby support group. "It's cheaper. I'm having another baby so I would like to get him together before the other one comes."

Author Boucke is pleased the practice is growing. "I think more people are trying it now because the concept has been repressed and lied about so much, in large part due to the diaper industry," she said. Her most recent book is Infant Potty Basics: With or Without Diapers, the Natural Way.

"There is a lot of fear and misunderstanding about infant potty training," she said. "It is more about bonding, communication and responsiveness than about hurrying toilet learning."

- Katherine Snow Smith writes about parenting from her home in St. Petersburg.

The Hillsborough County Diaper Free Baby support group will meet at 10:30 a.m. June 21. Call 813 671-5307 or log on to www.diaperfreebaby.org for more information.

[Last modified May 27, 2005, 09:00:08]