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Have any parents tried Elimination Communication? Basically teaching your baby to inform you that they’re ready to go, and taking them to the toilet immediately

• jbgt 8mo ago
  It works well! And it's not huge effort either. Don't overpressure your self or your kid but go ahead and follow the method it's fine. You'll be fine.
• shrubhub 8mo ago
  it must have made a big impression on you!
  • joenot443 8mo ago
    Enough to make a comment, that’s for sure!
• showerst 8mo ago
  A friend wanted to try this, but no daycares would do it.
  • trollbridge 8mo ago
    Nappies were an essential part of “industrialising” child care (and thus making both parents available as a labour pool outside of the home).
• colmmacc 8mo ago
  EC only works if parents are the sole carers, and every success story I've heard had one main parent doing 90% of the care-taking. No daycare would do it, and if you can find a nanny, au-pair, grand-parent or other carer who is up for it ... small kids still just behave differently around different people. If they have a different level of comfort, anxiety, or reluctance with a person it breaks down.
  • jbgt 8mo ago
    No, you just don't have to be black or white about it. At daycare they don't do it, that's ok. Do it at home. It's not a PROJECT, it's an orientation. Take it easy.
• ihavekids 8mo ago
  I’ve tried it. My youngest (21 months) can definitely inform us that she needs to go to the bathroom. But she’s not quite ready to use the toilet. She either doesn’t want to sit on it, sit long enough, or gets distracted. The kid definitely needs to be open for potty training in order to it to work. My oldest was potty trained at exactly 2 years. We just let her run around without a diaper and there was one specific time she peed that everything clicked for her.
• trollbridge 8mo ago
  Yes. Requires complete consistency but by my third child, she consistently goes #2 on her little potty. Once you don’t have to change poopy nappies anymore, you’ll never want to go back. EC is actually less work in the long run. Note that my wife and I both share responsibilities for taking care of the kids. It is not that time consuming.
• rocmcd 8mo ago
  As a parent, this is a hilarious comment. This is like saying "why don't you just teach your cat to use the toilet instead of using a litter box?". I mean, yeah, that sounds awesome. Given infinite time and energy, I'm sure it's possible. Best of luck to you, though. And I don't say that to be rude or disparaging, it's just that parenting is a little like war: your plans never survive contact with the enemy. I had similar thoughts and ideas before I had kids, and they all went out the window when you deal with the real thing. Sleepless nights, a screaming infant, being scared out of your mind when they're sick... but then you will find a calmness unattainable anywhere else as you hold your sleeping child. All of your accomplishments will pale in comparison to the joys of parenthood, and you will unironically look back at those years as some of the best years of your life. You will see.
  • KaiserPro 8mo ago
    Its possible to do, the problem is, it takes months cleaning piss and shit to get to there. I think its fine if one of you is staying at home all the time doing child care.
  • beAbU 8mo ago
    The irony of your comment is that it is actually possible to train cats to use the toilet, and it's not even that difficult. But other than that, I fully agree with your sentiment that it's like war. My sibling comment to yours quoted Sun Tsu: "even the best laid plans will not survive contact with the enemy". My favourite example is when our 3 month old decides to have her weekly Big Shit after we get her all cleaned and dressed up for going out somewhere, right as we walk out the front door.
  • wktmeow 8mo ago
    It’s really not at all as difficult as you’re making it out to be.
• UncleMeat 8mo ago
  You can try it. Parents should try what they want and there is a huge amount of "you must do it this way or else" material that just produces unnecessary stress. My observation is that there is limited research showing that this actually works and that the amount of extra effort required to constantly be observing the baby for these cues makes the already extremely difficult task of caring for a baby just more difficult, even if it did work.
  • em-bee 8mo ago
    the amount of extra effort required to constantly be observing the baby [...] makes [...] caring for a baby just more difficult you learn a lot more about your baby than just elimination cues by observing it. i'd argue that that effort is not difficult at all and has a lot of other benefits. see attachment parenting. you are right about "you must do it this way or else" producing unnecessary stress though.
    • UncleMeat 8mo ago
      It is true that you can learn a lot by observing babies. Observing them constantly so that you don't fail to miss these cues is a bigger task.
• prismatix 8mo ago
  If one of you is a stay at home parent, then it's worth trying. But don't stress yourself out trying to make it happen. I have 2 kids. The first I was able to stay home with for 1 year. We did what I'd call "light EC" which worked well and she was using the potty for BMs most of the time by 1 year old. She was fully potty trained by 2. Second child: both parents are working full time, which means childcare is split between nanny & daycare. The nanny is pretty good about encouraging the potty, but EC went pretty much out the window. Daycare facility doesn't even have potties until the 2 year old room. She isn't 2 yet, but is just starting to understand the connection between the sensation and actually going.
• mizzao 8mo ago
  We did this with both our kids; the first one stopped pooping in diaper by 5 months. This made cloth diapers much more feasible as you just have to rinse. A local daycare was willing to do it as well and so she was fully potty trained well before starting preschool at 2 years. As others have said though, YMMV so don't beat yourself up if your kid won't do it. 80% by age 1 in 1944 is a great data point for what's possible though.
• scuff3d 8mo ago
  To each their own man, but I have a 9 month old and it's enough work without having to be on high alert constantly for bathroom queues.
• doctorpangloss 8mo ago
  all the negativity aside. it worked well for my older son, the second is almost old enough to try. both my wife and i have full time jobs, and we were working while he was potty training using andrea olson's EC book. there's all sorts of stuff you can do with your kids. i don't have anything more insightful (or cringe) to say besides, it's cool you are thinking about this now haha
• beAbU 8mo ago
  My partner wanted to try the same thing. And cloth nappies and exclusive breastfeeding, and infant hand signals, and every other zeitgeist baby thing you can think of. In principle EC sounds interesting, but then our daughter arrived, it has balls to the wall survival for 3 months bow. We ended up bottle feeding, use disposable nappies and sometimes we put her on her side to sleep so that she can fall asleep easier. Terrible parenting if you ask any parenting influencer! Neither of us have the time, energy or mental fortitude to get baby naked and over the toilet in the 20 seconds between when the grunting starts and the poop comes! My advice to you as a new father, assuming you will also be the father and your partner the mother: go into all this with an open mind, and focus on doing what your baby needs, not what you want, and definitely not what the internet says you should be doing. Sun Tzu said the best laid plans don't survive contact with the enemy, so don't get hung up when your plans fall apart when your little one arrives. Support your partner in the things she wants to try, but be pragmatic and prepared for all alternative outcomes. Keep baby's butt dry, keep their belly full of milk (breast or formula or both is perfectly OK), keep them warm and love them loads. That's literally all you need to do, and you will be awarded with the most amazing smiles and giggles by month 2-3.
  • simulator5g 8mo ago
    What's wrong with sleeping on your side? Most people find it very uncomfortable to sleep on their backs. No doubt this applies to infants as well.
    • magicalhippo 8mo ago
      > What's wrong with sleeping on your side? There's a chance the baby rolls from the side onto their stomach, and that is associated with an increased chance of dying[1]. So in general better to avoid if you can. [1]: https://www.nichd.nih.gov/sites/default/files/publications/pubs/documents/SIDS_QA-508-rev.pdf https://www.nichd.nih.gov/sites/default/files/publications/p...
    • beAbU 8mo ago
      Like a sibling comment says, you risk the baby rolling on to its face and suffocating. All the midwives at the hospital and all the books say to not do it, but any mother in law will tell you to just put the baby on its side if it's fussy. If you challenge the MIL she'll throw the "I've raised more babies than you so I know better" remark in your face. A tale as old as time I guess. Eventually we caved, and it really works to calm them down. But we only do it under supervision. When she's asleep we'll roll her on her back.
• oseph 8mo ago
  My sibling used EC with my nieces and it worked really well! Took a bit of patience up front but the kids were basically potty trained within a few months of being born. They also used cloth diapers because accidents happen, but rarely so!
• ytoawwhra92 8mo ago
  Every baby is different. Some are relaxed, others are highly strung. Some will happily sit in a comfortable seat, others will demand to be held. Some will feed quickly, others will take their time. Some will sleep in a crib from the day they're born, others will need practice. Some will be happy, others will cry for hours for no apparent reason. Every family is different. Some parents have lots of external support, others have none. Some parents have generous parental leave, others have to return to work almost immediately. What's common is that babies have a constant, high-frequency stream of demands that need to be met by an adult in the household (need food, attention, comfort, to be cleaned, to be dressed, to sleep, etc.). Meeting these demands typically requires the full attention of an adult in the moment, but there's also some amount of preparation and cleanup that needs to be done. That stuff has to be done by another adult, or if one is not available, fit around the immediate demands of the baby. You can't effectively fold the laundry and comfort a crying baby simultaneously. All of this to say: elimination communication is known to work, but whether it will work for your family will depend heavily on your specific baby and your specific family circumstances. When you commit to EC, you are committing to another immediate demand that needs an adult's full attention in the moment. If your baby is otherwise not very demanding, or if you have a lot of external support this may work well for your family. Lots of parents, though, opt to use nappies specifically because it shifts an immediate demand ("I'm pooping") into a problem that can be solved within the next few minutes. If you're the only adult in the house, you've got a big armful of clean laundry, and you see your baby making the poop face do you want to drop the laundry and rush to the toilet or do you want to fold the laundry and then change the baby? Your answer will be different depending on how much time in the day your family has to get the laundry done. Parenting influencers don't share the broader context of their families or their babies. And like all influencers, many of them are liars and do not practice what they preach. EC is in vogue right now, so a lot of them are advocating for it. I personally find the idea quite appealing but our family simply did not have the time or circumstances to even attempt it.
• wktmeow 8mo ago
  Yes, being born in the Soviet Union this is how my parents toilet trained me, and we did it with our daughter as well but were only able to catch it for defecation and not urination, but even having done that was so handy. She eventually would grunt to let us know, which as she learned to talk transitioned easily to a verbal cue. I think we had not had a soiled poopy diaper after I want to say 12 months old, but can’t remember exact age now. Potty training for urination came much easier after this as it wasn’t such a foreign concept. It was not particularly difficult to implement and we didn’t spend a lot of time focusing on it - we caught it by being attentive a few times and it just got easier from there. Highly recommend it