EC is a peaceful and loving way to communicate with your child and to meet their most intimate needs. There are no gold stars and there is no coercion.

We do not cheer for children when they use the potty, nor do we admonish “misses” (we don’t call them “accidents” because that implies some sort of right or wrongness to the body). My husband holds that conventional parenting essentially trains a child to use their underwear as a toilet, and then makes a multi-billion dollar industry out of helping us “train them” to use a potty at the age when they are most likely to hate you telling them to do anything.ĮC is not a system of reward and punishment. He is supremely confident in his dismissal of the notion that children “can’t” control their bladders.

I overhear him talking to other dads, describing how happy he is that he has never scraped solid poop off of our sons’ bottoms. He became the most unlikely of supporters and proponents of EC. By 17 months he was wearing tiny underwear and, now almost 6, he has no conscious memory of ever pooping in a diaper or of wearing diapers at all.Īfter this dramatic 9 months, my husband was a believer. By 12 months of age, he stopped peeing in his cloth diaper. Sensing this was going to escalate into a fight, I decided to start quietly observing our first son’s behaviors when he 'went potty.' I read 'Diaper Free Baby' by Ingrid Bauer, I talked to my friend every day to report on our progress, and remarkably, a pattern emerged! By the age of 10 months - before our son could crawl, walk, or talk - he signed reliably when he had to use the potty. That’s why they make diapers, he insisted: for babies to pee and poop in. He thought it was ridiculous, impossible, and absurd, and that it would create a barrier between him and our son, since he never thought he would be interested, much less successful, in learning any supposed cues for pottying.

My husband is one of the people who preferred the latter definition, and when I told him that a friend of mine was practicing EC with her newborn, he asked me to either stop talking to her or stop talking to him. Some people think that people who practice EC are crazy, and some people think that crazy is too harsh a word preferring instead “totally out of their heads loco bonkers insane in the membrane.” Some people practice EC only at home, some practice it all the time some start when their babies are newborns, others wait several months. Elimination Communication (EC, also known as Natural Infant Hygiene) is the term for learning a baby’s innate inborn cues for pottying, responding to those cues, reinforcing them, and ultimately, helping a child not pee or poop in a diaper.

Diaper Free by Ingrid Bauer