Baby Diaper-Free Potty Training Tips & Tricks From A New Mom

Baby Potty Training Tips – This is my personal experience trying to avoid diapers. Plus my tips for new moms considering diaper free baby potty training (or Elimination Communication). I started EC with my son at 13 weeks.

Learn HOW Elimination Communication works! And WHY the Go Diaper Free potty training method for babies makes the most sense. Here’s how we’ve done so far…

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TRANSCRIPT:

Hello everybody and welcome to today’s video!

Do you know the average baby will spend their first 2 to 4 years going potty in their diaper?

As a new mom, people are always confused or surprised when I announce we are going diaper free.

Imagine breaking free from diaper changes and costs much sooner!

I’m going to share my insight with you on our Elimination Communication journey, which we started with Silas when he was 13 weeks.

What is Elimination Communication? Well, it’s been around for ages. Think about how our ancestors coped before the invention of diapers in the 50s. It’s the predominant form of baby hygiene in many cultures, Eastern civilizations, and third world countries. To put it real simple… It’s a combination of timing signals, cues, and intuition between baby and the caregiver.

The caregiver will then help the baby potty in the appropriate place. It’s a gentle non-coercive method and offers no “rewards” or praise — unlike traditional Western potty training.

Unfortunately, we’ve become a diaper-dependent civilization, unconsciously training our babies to use the diaper as their toilet. Imagine being trained to do all your waste elimination in a diaper for the first few years of your life and then suddenly your caregiver wants you to go someplace different. No wonder potty training is so difficult for most kids and parents!

When a caregiver really “tunes in” they can distinguish different needs the baby’s trying to communicate. For the most part, as a mother I can decipher certain cries or signals that Silas gives when he’s trying to communicate with me. Because I have the luxury of spending all of our time together, I can tell when he’s hungry, tired, needs a burp, has gas, is uncomfortable… So trying to “tune in” when he needs to go potty as well does not require much more effort.

If I know he’s working on a package of poo it doesn’t make sense to me to just sit there and watch him eliminate in his diaper so he can sit in his own mess. I want to get him to the toilet and start establishing where potty belongs.

This is what I did to get started with EC. I purchased and read the digital copy of Go Diaper Free by Andrea Olson. Andrea has helped over 10,000 families with EC and she breaks down her method step-by-step with a variety of effective options. Some families choose to do EC part-time or full-time, use cloth or regular diapers for backup, it’s really up to you.

We choose a diaper backup — because we are not diaper free YET. I use the Pamper Swaddlers because they are so soft and they have the wetness indicator. The indicator helps me acknowledge when I miss a signal.

I purchased a Baby Bjorn mini potty. There are a lot of options, but this is the one I chose because of the splash guard. So I observed Silas for a couple days. Sometimes just in his diaper watching for the wetness indicator stripe to turn blue. Or in the dry tub during diaper-free time. And while observing him, I was looking for signals he was giving me right before he went pee or poo. I mentally prepared myself to the required level of commitment — once I knew what those signals were.

I would say “wait,” carry him to the potty, remove his diaper, sit him on the potty, cue him with sounds like “pssssss” OR like grunting. Then I’d reuse the unsoiled diaper after towel drying him or cleaning him up.

It’s not always easy to catch the signals. Some days, I catch a lot of pees and poos, and I use way less diapers. Other days, I hardly catch anything and use more diapers. Sometimes Silas has a potty strike and we need to reboot from EC altogether. It is anything but easy right now, but I remain committed and focused on the goal to becoming diaper free as soon as possible.

I’m only sharing this information to help you get the conversation and the research started within YOUR family. It’ll be completely up to you how you will want to approach it, after you decide what will work best for your situation. Every baby is different and will learn at different rates. We decided we are the parents and our baby will follow our lead. Yours will do the same should you decide to go diaper-free.

Thanks for tuning in. Have an amazing day!