Potty training at 4 months? From TODAY Show...

[flminivanmama]

There was an article about this in the NYTimes Sunday edition. Some claim that trying to push your kids so young can lead to rebellion as the child gets older and you may have wetting problems later in the kid's life due to an unusual amount of unneeded stress.

I think those were just people who were asked if they had ever heard of it and they said "no but..." not child psychologists or anything...


and this definitely can be done part time! how many of you had/ have a baby that always poops first thing in the morning?

 

[JustAshe]

I certainly don't begrude the parents who want to do this... but my issue is with calling it "potty training". It's not. It's elimination communication. It's parent training. It's a lot of things, but potty training. Not so much.


I hate for parents who are already stressed to feel like this is one more thinking keeping them from their "Good Mommy Badge".




Mine is dusty by the way...

 

[Lisa loves Pooh]

I fail to understand the eagerness of today's society to deny our children their childhood. It's rush, rush, rush to get them to be more grown-up. Sorry, but poop happens to little kids. You'll have better luck training your cat to use the toilet!!!

Not condoning this...but if your read the literature on this..it has little to do with trying to make a child grow up too fast...more to do with not teaching them to sit in their filth (from what I have read--not my words).

On the holding it note--I also read, that you can train by association--essentially making the kid go on command.

I personally would like to think I'm raising a child and not an animal.

 

[Blondy876]

It's not really training the child to use the potty, it's training the parent to run the child to the potty all day. And whatever the parent saves on diapers they should put into an account to pay for all the therapy that child is going to need later on. An infant is not physically or developmentally ready to use the toilet. Potty training works best when you follow the child's lead, a newborn is too young.

 

[Lisa loves Pooh]

Oh, one more thought...But would this not also chain a SAHM to her home (not just working mothers?)? How would any mother (working or not) be able to leave her home for necessary errands (like food shopping, hitting the bank, etc) if she's holding her child over a toilet so frequently?

I am beginning to wonder where I read this and I hope I am not making it up....

But at some point--the kid will go by association..like making a clicking sound or something...that mom has always done when baby eliminates. Eventually the kid would be on a potty schedule.

I don't know how it works--but I don't think mom is stuck at home for 18 months to 2 years.

 

[punkin]

OK. As the only one on this thread who has actually done this, it is not as hard as it sounds. My older one was fully trained at 9 months. I mean no accidents, even in the middle of the night. My younger one was not so cooperative. She was not trained until she was 18 months (and she kept having occasional accidents unti she was 2) No therapist bills yet.

It's a cultural thing. I was not born in the US, and this is normal where I come from.

 

[phamton]

When my first child was born, my step-mom came to visit when my baby girl was around two months old and was there for about 3 weeks. She held my baby over the toilet also and I thought it was really strange. Anyway, my daughter refused to have a BM in her diaper after that. She would start to strain and cry but not go in her diaper. It was like she didn't like the feel of pushing it into her diaper. We continued with it and it wasn't difficult. She was breastfed and only had bowel movements every other day or so anyway. We didn't do it for urinating though. She was very easy to potty train and was trained by around 18-20 months and also dry and night. I have 4 other kids and never did the holding over the potty with any of them though.

One of my kids (a son) trained himself. He just started pulling off his diaper on his own and using the potty seat. I never had to train him at all. His twin sister had no interest in potty training until she was around 2 years old.

 

[JerseyJanice]

When I had my son 9 years ago, I was friendly with a girl at work who had a boy 6 months earlier.

She was one of these "modern" moms who was fervent about things like breastfeeding and using cloth diapers. She had huge issues with disposable diapers, saying that a baby in them couldn't feel any mess and that's why 3 years old is considered the norm for potty training nowadays.

While there may be some validity in her arguments, she took it pretty far and had her baby sitting on a potty seat every morning from the time he could sit up by himself (around 8 months or so).

When she had her second baby, the older boy was 2 years old, and she insisted he was potty-trained. She asked me to keep him two nights while she was in hospital, and since our sons were close friends at our work's daycare, I was glad to do it.

She sent only a handful of the cheap brand of pull-ups (Fitties?), and the kid was pooping and peeing in them like crazy. He never went anywhere near the bathroom or showed the even slightest indication that he was potty trained in any way. I didn't want to put him back in diapers, but BM's in those crummy little pull-ups were such a mess to clean up! I wound up buying a package of Huggies Pull-Ups and kept him in those until his dad picked him up.

Honestly, she thought that baby was potty-trained, but he didn't seem that way in the slightest to me. A few years later on, I had a big argument with her because she wouldn't allow her children to watch any "commercial" TV (only PBS or educational videos), and my son turned her older kid on to the Power Rangers. LOL!

Some parents go too far over the top.

 

[solferino]

I kind of did what phamtons step-mom did. It was mostly out of curiosity because I'd heard about it. I wasn't anal about it (pun intended!) but because DD *was* a sling baby she was right with me as I went about my day. By the time she was 18m old she was completley potty learned. No complaints here cause we used cloth diapers.

I don't see it as teaching an infant anything... it's more of a learning experience for the parent to really be cued into their child. And having done it, it's really no more time consuming than a diaper change is.

TBPH some of the "modern" ways of parenting baffle me, but it's not my place to judge. Just as I don't want to be judged for the things I've chosen. I'm certain some of those would be baffling many.

 

[Lil_Tink]

The kids I babysit are 1, the start running from you if you say "Pooh
" like the character or other thing lol. No rush. Thats sad, 4months why waste time.