Out of nappies: when is my child ready, and what helps?

The most honest answer to “when should we start?”: not before your child is able to. ERIC puts signs in the child before any age.¹ What lands in the potty earlier is often chance, or good timing by the parents.

After that, a lot depends on the child. Everyone goes at their own pace. In many children, poos go in the potty a little before wees.

Nights are a separate project, with no direct link to practising during the day. They depend on the body maturing. Bedwetting is common well into primary school, affects about 1 in 15 seven-year-olds, runs in families and is nobody's fault; from the age of five, treatment is possible under the NICE guideline.² The American Academy of Pediatrics names three common causes of bedwetting, none of them a parenting mistake.⁸

And the famous signs of readiness? A review found 21 different signs in the literature, with no agreement on which matter or how many. Depending on which sign you treat as decisive, the ideal time to start shifts a lot. On average, 15 of the 21 signs are present at 30 months.³ In practice: no list replaces watching your own child.

1. Let the potty settle in before it gets a job. It's there, they can sit on it with trousers on, nothing happens. Something already familiar meets less resistance later.

2. Suggest rather than ask. “Let's go for a moment” works better than “do you need to go?”: in the middle of a game, the answer to the second is always no. Fixed moments (on waking, before going out, after meals) are easier than random ones.

3. Clothes your child can pull down alone. An elastic waist decides success or accident more often than any parenting attitude.

4. Accidents, without comment. Change, carry on, no lecture. Every reaction, even disappointment, makes the potty a place where you can get it wrong.

5. Praise what your child did. “You felt it and you went” is something they can repeat. “There's something in there” isn't up to them, and the next time the potty is empty they'll feel they failed.

6. Keep an eye on poos. It's the most important point and the most often forgotten: hard poos hurt, and what hurts, a child holds in. Holding in leads to constipation, and a constipated child avoids the potty. If that's happening, talk to your GP early.

Starting under pressure of a date. A change of nursery, the holidays, a visiting grandparent: poor signals to start. There are signs that an early start tends to make training longer.⁶

Long sessions. A few minutes are enough. Keeping a child sitting until something comes builds resistance in exactly that spot.

Reward systems that turn into pressure. A sticker in passing is no problem. A chart that shows this week went worse than last puts a child under pressure.

Forcing the nights. Taking the nappy off at night because days are going well confuses two different kinds of maturing.

Treating setbacks as going backwards. After a new brother or sister arrives, when starting nursery, in the middle of a move, children start wetting again. The ability is still there, it's just busy elsewhere. It passes if it isn't made into a big deal.

On few topics do guides contradict each other so clearly, and nowhere are the studies so thin. Three approaches you'll find in every parent forum:

For coming out of nappies, a story has a different task than for anger or arguments: there's no opponent. There's a routine that needs to become familiar, and an accident that needs to lose its fright. Both of those can be read.

There's a practical bonus too: the potty is already the place where children sit and look at a book. A book in which the child does exactly what they're learning mostly keeps them company.