Despite the lack of an exciting moniker, elimination communication is a pretty exciting business. When I was pregnant with my daughter, I learned that many cultures actually communicate with their babies about going to the bathroom and work with babies to use the potty before the babies can talk. I’d always assumed that my daughter would be in diapers – cloth diapers, yes, but diapers nonetheless.
Now, elimination communication shouldn’t be confused with old-fashioned punitive methods that involved forcing babies and young toddlers to sit on the potty for a long time, trying to go to the bathroom. Elimination communication is exactly the opposite. It’s a process of listening to your baby’s cues that he is going to pee or poo, then taking him to the potty. When the baby and adult get to the bathroom and the baby uses the toilet, the adult makes one sound for pee and another for poo, to communicate with the baby that this is the place to go and to associate different sounds with different types of elimination. After all, the different types of elimination require different sorts of muscle control and have very distinct feelings!
Now that you’re all writhing in your seats, let me say that our culture seems to be quite open about many things, but baby poo and baby pee don’t seem to be two of those things. And actually talking to your baby about going to the potty? Why? And yuck!
Why do elimination communication, or EC? Well, since we were going to use cloth diapers, I was very intent on making sure that my daughter’s rear end didn’t get too sore. That meant that I planned to change her very regularly. Since I planned to change her regularly, why not take the next step and just go in the potty, reducing the need for diaper changes!
And yuck? Well, EC isn’t that yucky. To me, wiping baby poop off my baby’s back was a little bit icky, but taking her to the potty and wiping her bottom just didn’t have the same “ick” level. Sure, there were misses and I got peed on, but baby pee doesn’t bother me.
How about the time involved? Is this practical for working parents? Yes and no. It is possible to do part time EC when you are home. I did, and I believe that it still helped us potty train quite early. My daughter never wanted to use her diaper as a potty, and that’s the first step of potty training – to make the potty an attractive place to go, rather than the diaper. The grandparents did part time care for our daughter, and one put her in diapers and the other didn’t. She adjusted.
I believe that our experience with elimination communication was a good one, and despite some early wet laps, I think that it really reduced the stress of potty learning later on. Would you do this?