Potty training revisited

Do you remember many many months back, I wrote in my blog about Vicky trying to potty train Caleb? Well, it wasnt very successful probably cos we didnt try hard enough.

Anyway, I am back again, revisiting where I left off. The reason is because I chanced upon an article on Diaper Free Baby network or support group. They encourage mothers to start training their baby right from the start once they are borned!

I was quite intrigued by that article and went on to search for articles on the internet as well as borrow recommended books to read about it.

These are 2 books I borrowed from the library that talk about recommending potty training your infant from young.

First book is called "The Diaper Free Baby" by Christine Gross-Loh



The second book I borrowed is called "Trickle Treat" by Laurie Boucke


They do not refer this as potty training but effective communication (EC). It is really about how effective you can communicate with your baby and vice versa. So the books talk about how to read those signs from your baby, how to respond to them and how to engage in a process of joyful communication with your baby at a pace that feels right for your family, whether this means once a day or more often. So, they offers full time EC'ers, part time EC'ers and occasional EC'ers...depending on your commitment and time.

The first step is to observe your babies' pee and poo time and by looking at their expressions. So, its good to record all the timings, including the feeding times. Then secondly, you have to cue by making sounds like "ssss" (for pee) and "hmmmm" (for poo). These are cues that the baby would be able to recognise when practised often enough so that they would then relate these sounds with the appropriate action.
Its like a conditioned reflex. For e.g Each time when I feed my dog, I would ring the bell...and in time to come, when I just ring the bell, my dog would probably shake his tail and salivate as he would think its feeding time as he associates the bell sound to eating.

I have yet to do it on Caleb as I am still reading the books but I really hope to accomplish it and succeed because...
1) it will definitely save me a tremendous amount of money spent on disposable diapers

2)spare many trees (One billion trees go into the manufacture of disposable diapers in one year! IT takes the pulp of one tree to make 500-1000 disposable diapers. At that rate, you save 10-20 trees per child by using EC method)

3)save oil (3.5 billion gallons of oil are used to produce 1 year supply of disposable diapers)

4)diapers make a mountain out of a landfill as they cannot be decomposed.

That is a huge toll of the environment, dont you think?

"So what? Who cares about all these environmental statistics?" you may think...

Well, in time to come, the ones to suffer would be our children or grandchildren as they would be the ones facing the mess we are making.

So, for mothers with infants, do read up on books regarding potty training for infants to avoid or reduce the use of diapers. There are definitely many success stories from all over the world who adopt this when I read up about it- babies at the age of 8 months plus or 1 year have already been potty trained. I will definitely hold on to this to inspire me to hang on...Do give it a try!