Toilet Training involves learning a set of fairly complex skills for a young person. From their perspective, there are two sets of invisible muscles to control, bowel and bladder, which up to this point have worked by themselves. Then there are new sensations to recognise, play must be interrupted to get to the toilet and a certain degree of self control is involved.

There are many books and resources on the topic of toilet training. Some say that children can be trained as early as 3 months and others see no hurry at all to complete the process. Obviously different cultures have different methods of accomplishing this skill. Personally, we found that setting aside a couple of weeks to be at home and do some intense training worked for us. It did mean some short term sacrifice but it also meant that the process didn’t take months to complete. You may not be able to set aside a block of time for toilet training so the slower process may suit you better. Whichever way you choose to go, we encourage you to look for readiness signs in your child and then make the decision to train them once. False starts or starting the process then stopping again can mean that toilet training becomes more stressful and time consuming than it needs to be. How do you know when they are ready? That’s what we’ll cover in next month’s issue.