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"Oh look at your daughter! She's weeing on demand. What a good girl!"
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"It doesn't seem very natural to me to make your child go to the toilet on cue"
Above are all comments I have heard others make about elimination communication. And each comment is based on a misunderstanding of EC. Elimination communication is NOT about training a child to wee or poo on demand for parental convenience (although it can be coincidentally convenient to parents). The purpose and aim of elimination communication is to foster communication between parent and child and to maintain and nurture the child's natural awareness of her elimination urges.
Personally, I object to the term "infant potty/toilet training" to refer to EC because it does not accurately reflect elimination communication. EC is about communicating about elimination! Parents who practice EC do not treat their children like animals or use Pavlovian techniques to condition their children to wee or poo on cue. Rather, parents watch and listen to their children closely and learn their children's natural body language and sounds which they make when they are about to wee or poo.
ECing parents who make a sound while their children wee or poo (and not all do) do so to help strengthen their child's awareness of how it feels to eliminate. If this awareness is kept strong within children they remain clear in their communication to their parents that it is time to make a catch. In addition to maintaining strong elimination awareness in infants, making a sound (such as "sssss") while the child wees or poos helps the child to relax her body and therefore helps her release her elimination because of the association she has with weeing and pooing and that sound.
When a silly nurse said my daughter was weeing on demand I pointed out that it was the other way around; I was catching her wee on cue. If anything, EC is about parent training :)
Training or conditioning a baby to wee and poo at times based purely on parental convenience is not natural or gentle or empathetic. Parents who practice this kind of infant training are not communicating with their children, because communication is a two way street.
Personally, I object to the term "infant potty/toilet training" to refer to EC because it does not accurately reflect elimination communication. EC is about communicating about elimination! Parents who practice EC do not treat their children like animals or use Pavlovian techniques to condition their children to wee or poo on cue. Rather, parents watch and listen to their children closely and learn their children's natural body language and sounds which they make when they are about to wee or poo.
ECing parents who make a sound while their children wee or poo (and not all do) do so to help strengthen their child's awareness of how it feels to eliminate. If this awareness is kept strong within children they remain clear in their communication to their parents that it is time to make a catch. In addition to maintaining strong elimination awareness in infants, making a sound (such as "sssss") while the child wees or poos helps the child to relax her body and therefore helps her release her elimination because of the association she has with weeing and pooing and that sound.
When a silly nurse said my daughter was weeing on demand I pointed out that it was the other way around; I was catching her wee on cue. If anything, EC is about parent training :)
Training or conditioning a baby to wee and poo at times based purely on parental convenience is not natural or gentle or empathetic. Parents who practice this kind of infant training are not communicating with their children, because communication is a two way street.
2 comments:
Oh yay!! I have been impatiently awaiting this one :)
Out of curiosity, do you do the noise?
Yeah we do :) Originally I planned not to do it because I was once one of those people who thought ECing was a bit like treating your child like a trained monkey *blush* but after reading the potty whisperer and tribal baby websites I was better informed and when we started doing EC I felt that making a sound would help us communicate better because it would strengthen her awareness of what we were doing. I figured having another aspect of the practice (the sound) would help let her know "we're catching your wee or poo now", whereas just holding her in the position might not be as clear because sometimes we hold her in a very similar position but we're not catching wee or poo.
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