Toilet Training Babies in India

It turns out that there are different ways to know when a baby needs to go. They base this on an intuitive feeling, signals from the baby or on timing. For example, they know that they need to take their babies to the bathroom as soon as the infants wake up in the morning. They familiarize themselves with the intervals between bathroom visits. One of the babies needed to pee frequently while the other two waited 30 minutes or an hour between pees. The women were familiar with these elimination patterns. One of the babies was old enough to crawl and would crawl towards the bathroom when he had to go. One of the smaller ones would yell when he needed to go. The third baby didn't offer any clear signals about when she had to go, so the mother had to figure this out by timing and intuition.

The two toddlers appeared to be toilet trained. They ran to the bathroom and took care of business on their own. Their mothers accompanied them in order to be sure the children cleaned themselves and washed their hands properly.

The women demonstrated over and over again that afternoon that there is no need for diapers when raising a baby. Taking care of their children's toilet needs is viewed as an integral part of child care. There is no squeamishness about it, and there was certainly never any complaining about it.

We were touched when we saw the closeness between the women and their babies. These women and their babies were communicating with each other on a level we had never seen before.

When we got back to our hotel that night, Lisa and I chatted about infant elimination training for hours. For a while, we thought that this is something that Western women can't do, but then decided that anyone should be able to do it by making simple adaptations to their own living environment and situation. During our remaining days in India, we smiled whenever we noticed mothers peeing their babies along the roadside or in other places. We left India knowing that we would use this method of toileting our own babies one day.

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