‘Just Sit Them on the Potty’
· The Atlantic
The time has come to admit it: The United States has a potty-training problem. In Utah, a law came into effect last year mandating that, with some exceptions, children will not be allowed to enroll in public school without first being toilet trained. Kansas lawmakers introduced a similar bill in January, and at least one district in Florida is considering a policy change that could force kindergartners to stay home until they are out of diapers.
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These directives have come about because growing numbers of children are showing up to school unprepared to use the toilet. And U.S. schools aren’t the only ones confronting this issue. In the United Kingdom, the nationally representative School Readiness Survey found that last year, more than a quarter of children were not toilet trained when they began primary school (which most children do the September after they turn 4). Felicity Gillespie, the chief executive of Kindred Squared, the organization that commissions the annual survey, told me this means that teachers “can never really get into the curriculum, because they’re constantly having to take kids out and change their nappies.”
The shift toward delayed potty training, I learned while reporting this article, has been under way for quite a long time. And the sources I spoke with pointed to a few factors driving it. One is that easy access to disposable diapers—which reduce the mess involved in having a child who can’t reliably make it to the toilet—has made the need for training less pressing. Another is that many families with working parents are short on the considerable time needed for monitoring trips to the bathroom. But from Gillespie’s perspective, the root of the issue is that parents are taking a child-led approach to what should be a “100 percent parent-led activity,” she said. “You don’t sit and wait for a child to say, ‘Do you know what? I think I’d like to try wearing pants today.’”
A desire to empower children as decision makers in their own lives, as well as an underlying wariness about parental authority, manifests in many trending parenting philosophies—and is perhaps most recognizable in “gentle” or “respectful” parenting, which emphasizes guidance and persuasion over rules and instruction. Broadly, this approach is rooted in an admirable desire to respect children as humans. The author of The Sovereign Child, a 2025 book that advocates for rules-free parenting, describes a general philosophy of “taking children seriously.” What it amounts to, though, is going to great lengths to avoid just telling your kid what to do.
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Potty training offers a strong case study in how easily the child-led approach can break down amid the realities of modern life.
In the United States, official guidance on toilet training has been through a huge evolution over the past century. In a 1938 guide to infant care, the U.S. Children’s Bureau advised that bowel training should begin at six months or earlier and be completed by the child’s first birthday; bladder training should start at 10 months, and daytime dryness should be achieved by age 2.
Things shifted in the mid-20th century, particularly after the pediatrician T. Berry Brazelton published a paper titled “A Child-Oriented Approach to Toilet Training,” in which he argued that a child needed to reach certain physiological and psychological milestones before their training could begin. Brazelton’s emphasis wasn’t really on starting at a particular age but on allowing the child to direct the process. “Don’t rush your toddler into toilet training or let anyone else tell you it’s time,” he said years later, in a 1998 Pampers commercial. “It’s got to be his choice.”
The child-led approach has had formal backing from established experts, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, since the 1960s. To this day, many American parents are coached to wait for signs of their child’s readiness before kick-starting the potty-training process. (Readiness is a fuzzy term, but it essentially means that a child will, in addition to hitting specific physical and cognitive milestones, ideally give indications that they’re motivated to use the toilet, such as expressing discomfort in soiled diapers and a desire to wear “big-kid” underwear.) A University of Michigan poll last year, of a national sample of parents, found that 75 percent reported initiating training when their child “seemed ready.” Other motivations for beginning—preparation for day care or preschool, the high cost of diapers—weren’t as influential.
All of this waiting for readiness has coincided with the emergence of delayed potty training. According to data from the 1950s, a large majority of kids, 80 percent, had completed bowel training by 24 months; only 5 percent were still bowel training after 34 months. Even within a sample of 1950s children whose parents were advised by Brazelton to use his child-oriented approach, 98 percent were daytime potty trained by age 3. Over the next few decades, this timeline was pushed back. A 2001 study found that close to zero percent of kids had completed potty training by 24 months, and only about half had done so by 36 months. Still, that study found that almost all kids had started training before their third birthday. These days, only 21 percent of kids begin potty training before they hit 2—and about a quarter do not begin until after they turn 3.
In parents’ defense, the readiness framework can be hard to follow. Tinne Van Aggelpoel, a Belgian pelvic-floor physiotherapist who has conducted research aimed at understanding the causes and consequences of delayed toilet training, told me that no consensus exists regarding what ought to count as a sign of readiness or when parents can expect signs to manifest. Some, such as the ability to stably sit on a potty, tend to emerge very young. Others, such as the capacity to walk or dress oneself, develop far later. And some seem unlikely to develop until potty training has begun: A child probably won’t start asking to use a potty chair or demonstrate the ability to sit on it for long stretches unless a potty chair is already in the picture. “If you don’t give your child a bicycle,” Van Aggelpoel said, “then they don’t learn to ride the bicycle, right?”
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The deeper issue, though, is that readiness does not develop in a vacuum. It is influenced by all sorts of social and environmental factors, including diapers, Van Aggelpoel said. Bodily cues—expressions that a child needs relief—are one common sign that a kid is ready to toilet train. But research by Van Aggelpoel and her colleagues suggests that disposable diapers reduce these signals. Without a diaper on, kids squirm and touch themselves when they need to use the toilet. Kids wearing a disposable diaper mostly carry on playing. And of course, to a great extent, readiness boils down to a child’s dissatisfaction with the diapered status quo—the discomfort of which today’s diapers have been explicitly designed to mitigate.
From Van Aggelpoel’s perspective, there’s no such thing as training too early. Continence, like crawling or walking, is a motor skill that develops over time. Its development relies on sensory feedback acquired through a messy trial-and-error process of exercise and repetition. “You do something, and something goes wrong,” Van Aggelpoel said, “and then you know, This was wrong; I need to do it in another way.” Just as children learning to roll, crawl, and walk need plenty of opportunities to lie on the floor, pull up on chairs, and tumble around, children learning to control their bowels need plenty of opportunities to experience all of the bodily sensations that go along with failing to hold it. Disposable diapers directly inhibit this feedback loop.
In the United Kingdom, experts have lately been departing from the readiness-centric paradigm. This past spring, when I was living in England, a health-care provider examining my then-10-month-old told me that there was no need to put off potty training, and then texted me a link to a site offering parents guidance on how to get started. “Should we wait for ‘signs of readiness’?” the FAQs read. “No!” the answer said. “The idea of readiness is not based on good research evidence.”
In the United States, too, experts seem to be subtly backing away from recommending that parents delay. In 2008, guidance from the American Academy of Family Physicians stated in no uncertain terms that the skills required for toilet training do not emerge until after age 2; it cited research suggesting that children benefit little from starting training earlier than 27 months, because the earlier training begins, the longer it takes. But an updated version of the guidance, published in 2019, acknowledged that kids in a lot of countries are trained much earlier—89 percent of Vietnamese children begin training by six months, and 98 percent are trained by 2, for example—and that normally developing children seemed to experience “no harms from early training.”
As recently as 2022, the American Academy of Pediatrics’ webpage outlining the right age to potty train stated that “child-development experts now believe that toilet training works best for most families if it can be delayed until the child is ready to control much of the process herself.” The current page is far less heavy-handed about children calling the shots, advising parents to “expect hesitancy.”
Dorota Talalay, a Polish writer who has pointed out how odd the delayed approach to potty training looks to many people outside the Anglosphere, acknowledged that training can indeed take longer the earlier that you start. But she told me that this doesn’t necessarily mean the training is harder. When she began plopping her child, at six months old, on the potty every 90 minutes or so, she received little resistance. “You just sit them on the potty,” she said, “and because they can’t walk, they just sit there, they do their thing, and then everybody moves on with their lives.”
By contrast, the current U.S. norm of waiting until kids are at least 2 means that potty training is aligned with a child’s “peak defiance,” Talalay said. She may be on to something. Per the Michigan poll, the most common potty-training difficulty that parents cite is the child “not being cooperative.” Oddly enough, then, if the goal is to avoid urging a child to begin training when they’d rather not, the key may be not to delay—but to start early.
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