Mothering, Mindfulness and a Baby's Bottom

by Sarah J Buckley MD
Web Exclusive

Excerpted from Gentle Birth, Gentle Mothering: The wisdom and science of gentle choices in pregnancy, birth, and parenting by Sarah J Buckley MD www.sarahjbuckley.com

Is it really possible to raise a baby without diapers? Can our babies actually communicate their elimination needs?

Well, how do you know when your baby needs to breastfeed?

Perhaps you recognise a certain gesture or cry. Perhaps your baby is restless, fist or finger sucking, or has a newborn's blind rooting behaviour. Maybe you also consider when your baby last fed, and whether they might have a special need for the breast because of tiredness, teething or being in an unfamiliar environment. As well, you might think about your infant's activity level; the weather; his or her routine; your routine; and many other factors that you instinctively take into account when you interpret your baby's signals.

And when you offer your breast, you usually get a "Yes" from your baby, but sometimes they will decline, or be only half interested, whether or not you are reading the signals correctly.

However, gradually and gently, you and your baby learn to fit together, communicating with each other and having a mutually satisfying nursing relationship — not to mention saving on all the cost and activity that formula feeding can imply.

Now imagine the same process, but with a focus on what your baby produces, rather than what they take in. This is elimination communication (EC) — also known as elimination timing (ET), natural infant hygiene (NIH), and infant potty training (IPT), among other names — in which we learn to communicate with our babies about their elimination: peeing and pooping.

Just as our babies know their own bodies, and their needs for food and breast, they also know the bodily sensations that go with the need to pee and poop, and they can, and usually do, communicate these needs. They tell us through body language, noises (from the bottom end as well as the top), fussiness, and also by the subtler, psychic communications that result from the intimate sharing of body space between mother and baby.

And if we pick up these signals, we can process them just as we do with breastfeeding, taking into account other factors and arriving at our interpretation of whether baby needs to eliminate. Then we have the opportunity to respond and offer a solution matched exactly to this baby's need. We can hold our babies in a position, and in a place, that facilitates their act of elimination. We can also feel, as with nursing, the satisfaction of consciously fulfilling our babies' needs from our own resources.

Sometimes we will misinterpret the signals, or may not be getting a clear message, just as with breastfeeding. And our babies will sometimes generously allow us to feed them — and toilet them — according to our needs, if we are going out, going to sleep, etc.

Like breastfeeding, EC has a powerful impact on our relationship with our babies, opening up new levels of communication and understanding, as well as keeping us finely tuned to our baby's their wavelength. EC highlights the mutuality that is, I believe, what our babies most need from us as mothers, and which can be lost or diluted in modern child-rearing practices.

This is not a method of toilet training, as some have misinterpreted. Rather it is an enlightening process for baby and mother (and possibly other carers) that makes conventional toilet training unnecessary, because our babies have never learned to ignore their body's signals. Neither is EC a way of making babies control their bladder or bowels prematurely, coercively, or traumatically. It does, however, dissolve the illusion that children have no control over elimination until the toddler years.

EC is also what the global majority of mothers and babies regard as normal. Very few women worldwide have the resources, facilities, or need for diapers. EC parallels the activities of other mammalian mothers, and seems to be as close to our genetic imprint as we can get.

Why elimination communication?

I came to choose EC with Maia Rose, my fourth baby, after learning about the possibility through several sources. I had read a letter to Mothering magazine in 1998 written by Rosie Wilde (who set up the first EC website) describing her positive experiences using elimination timing with her son.¹ Elsewhere, I had read that African women cue their babies by making a "psss" noise when they pee, and I started doing this with Maia when she was newborn. A friend pointed me towards the website when Maia was three months, and, inspired, I held her over the laundry tub for the first time. I made the familiar "psss" noise, and, to my amazement, she peed straight away.

In my daily practice of EC, I had a lot of support from Emma (then ten), Zoe (seven) and Jacob (five) who told me how much they disliked sitting in wet or soiled diapers as babies. Some believe that we set up our society for sexual problems by encouraging our babies to dissociate, or switch off, from unpleasant sensations in their genital areas.