I want to talk about something that worries me deeply.
For several years I have been observing a trend that, for me, has no biological justification — and that is spreading more and more visibly into our homes: children are staying in diapers longer and longer. Not until twelve months. Not until eighteen. More and more often until the third, sometimes the fourth, even the fifth year of life. And around this trend a whole folklore has grown — of professionals, bloggers and therapists — explaining that “every child has their own time” and that “potty training below the age of two is incompatible with development.”
I would like to invite you into a different perspective. Not a new one — but a very, very old one.
Sixty years, not three hundred thousand
Let’s start with a single number that should give us pause.
Homo sapiens has been on this planet for around 300,000 years. For most of that time we had no Pampers, no wet wipes, no apps tracking how many diapers got filled. We also had no category called “readiness for toilet training” — because nobody needed one.
The disposable diaper as we know it today is an invention of the 1960s. In the United States it appeared on a mass scale only towards the end of the 1970s. In Poland — just forty-six years ago, when I was born — it was completely unknown. My grandmothers taught my aunts and uncles to use the potty, and my mother taught me — without knowing the word “Pampers.”
Now a question that has no easy answer: did the urinary and nervous system of Homo sapiens change in the course of a single generation so dramatically that a child who for thousands of years was ready for toilet training before their first birthday today needs two and a half years, three, four years?
The answer is no. The children have not changed. We — the adults — have changed, and so, very profitably, has the industry that serves us.
What mothers in other parts of the world have always known
Let’s leave Polish parenting blogs aside for a moment and step into anthropology.
In villages across sub-Saharan Africa, mothers still do not use diapers. None. Not disposable, not cotton, not even cloths. The baby is carried close to the body, in a sling, in direct contact. The mother learns to read the signals — a facial expression, the tension of the back, a characteristic groan — and at the right moment moves the child away from her body, holding them in a squatting position. A three-month-old. A six-month-old. A one-year-old. The ritual is the same.
Among the Indigenous peoples of South America — the same practice. Among Inuit communities, in much harsher climatic conditions — analogous. Toilet training begins in the first weeks of life, because it is not really “potty training” at all — it is observation and response.
In Western literature this practice even has a name: Elimination Communication. The communication of physiological needs. The very name is an advertisement for what we stubbornly refuse to do — to communicate with our own child about one of their most fundamental bodily needs.
And do you know what is the most humbling thing about this comparison? Those mothers do not have master’s degrees in neurodevelopment, or podcasts about attachment parenting. They simply look at their own child and respond.
What it actually looks like when a child poops into a diaper (and why we don’t want to see it)
Try for a moment to think about something you look at every day and have stopped seeing.
A one-year-old, an eighteen-month-old, a two-year-old begins to defecate. They stop in their play, squat down, go red, sometimes hide behind a curtain. They are focused, sometimes tired, sometimes visibly impatient. They are trying to push stool into a plastic bag glued to their buttocks.
Let’s think about that for a moment, properly. The child has to overcome three barriers at once:
- The diaper sticks to the buttocks — the older the child, the more force is needed to push the stool out, because nothing moves away, nothing falls away, everything stays against the body.
- The position is unnatural — standing or half-sitting, without support of the feet on the ground, without engagement of the pelvic muscles in the way this system was evolutionarily designed to work.
- The stool returns against the body — it stays in direct contact with the skin of the perineum, the genitals, sometimes the abdomen.
And the parent stands next to the child, with or without a smartphone, and waits for them to finish so they can change them. Because “they’re not ready for the potty yet.”
Ask yourself: if someone proposed to you this way of using the toilet for the next two years, how would you feel? Why, when we see that the child is starting something, does it not occur to us to take off the diaper and sit them on a potty?
A disposable diaper is a thermos — quite literally
Now for a part of the conversation we rarely have, and which we should not put away in the drawer labelled “controversial.”
A modern disposable diaper functions like a thermos. Its outer layer is practically impermeable to moisture and air. Inside there is an absorbent gel that holds urine in the immediate vicinity of the perineum. The child’s skin, even when it feels “dry to the touch,” remains for long hours in an environment with significantly elevated temperature and humidity.
For a girl this situation is unfavourable — at the very least because of the risk of recurrent urinary tract infections and yeast infections.
For a boy it is something more than discomfort. A man’s testicles are placed outside the body for a very specific evolutionary reason — the temperature inside the organism would be too high for them. The production of healthy sperm requires an environment about two degrees cooler than the rest of the body. The whole anatomy of the scrotum is evolution’s solution for how to provide that cooling.
And right now we put a boy into a thermos-warmed pocket for 24 hours a day for over two years. And nobody asks the question of what this is doing to those small testicles. There are no clear long-term studies on the impact of prolonged use of disposable diapers on male fertility in adulthood — or maybe there are, only it is not particularly convenient for us to broadcast them.
I would prefer there to be such studies. And I would prefer that we did not wait, full of concern, until the generation of boys who wore diapers until the age of three or four grows up and starts looking for the causes of infertility.
The chemistry that is worn twenty-four hours a day
That a disposable diaper is also simply an advanced chemical product is no secret. Superabsorbents (sodium polyacrylate), chlorine-bleached cellulose pulp, adhesives, dyes, sometimes fragrances. Some of these substances are neutral. Some raise concerns in individual studies — and these are studies that are rather difficult to find.
I do not want to write here that diapers “poison.” I want to write something else: for two and a half years, twenty-four hours a day, we keep in direct contact with the skin of a child’s perineum a material that an adult would not want to have on their own body even for a single day.
That alone should be an argument for shortening that period, not extending it.
The dependency that nobody names out loud
There is one more observation — and this one comes from my everyday practice in the institution, not from the literature.
Children who stay in diapers too long learn not to trust their own body.
That sounds strong, but it is exactly what one sees. A two-and-a-half-year-old, a three-year-old, fully aware, speaking, knowing their physiological functions, often asks the parent to put a diaper on them before pooping. The parent, disoriented, puts it on. Because “they’re afraid of it, let’s not force them.”
That is not fear. That is a cognitive habit. The child has spent dozens of months of their life learning one thing: defecation happens in a diaper. The full loop — urge, diaper, release — has been reinforced hundreds of times. The question “or maybe you could do it in the potty?” is, for this child, like a sudden question to an adult: “or maybe from tomorrow you could start breathing through your ear?” They understand the question, but they have no habit to support it.
Very often this is also accompanied by constipation. The child holds for hours, because they do not know how else. There are gastric problems, infections, a habit of withholding develops. More than once I have also heard from the parents of older children: “our child went to preschool in a diaper and only really learned to do without it there — because they had to.”
Except this learning should not happen in shock, in a strange place, under peer pressure. It should grow out of a natural process that begins at home, in the first year of life, and unfolds at its own pace.
The myth of “the child has to show they’re ready”
This is one of the most widespread — and in my view most harmful — messages of contemporary parenting.
The list of conditions can be impressive: the child must walk steadily, take their pants and trousers off on their own, verbally signal the need, point at the potty, fetch the diaper. And only then — only then! — “can we try.”
I have two questions which, once you ask them, make it difficult to go back to the original list:
Question one. What about children who will never walk? Children with cerebral palsy, with muscular dystrophy, with severe motor disabilities — are they supposed to stay in diapers for the rest of their lives because they “do not meet the walking criterion”?
Question two. What about blind, deaf, deaf-mute children, children with aphasia, children on the autism spectrum who will not point verbally or by gesture at the potty? What about children with mild intellectual disability — should they be, for life, “un-potty-trainable”?
Of course not. Each of these children can and should have the possibility of using a potty or a toilet, should begin learning to control the pelvic-floor muscles, and consolidate the ritual of going to the toilet in a squatting position with stable foot support. But if these children can — that means our “readiness criteria” list is false. It does not describe the development of the child. It describes the convenience of the adult who does not want to start.
The myth of “too early”
The second myth, running parallel, is the concept of “potty training too early.”
According to this idea, sitting a nine-month-old crawling child on a potty is a “disturbance of development,” and trying to respond to the signals of a several-month-old infant is “violence.” I have encountered this in statements by pediatricians, in posts by parenting bloggers, in the brochures of diaper manufacturers.
Ask yourself: what exactly bad happens when a nine-month-old child, who has just started to concentrate before defecating, is gently placed by an adult who is present with them on a potty, with their feet supported on the floor, in a position in which the entire excretory system works in line with anatomy and gravity? What exactly are we disturbing here?
We are not disturbing anything. On the contrary — we are supporting the nervous system in learning natural control of the body in its most plastic developmental window.
The concept of “potty training too early” is an artificially created idea of the last forty years. Three hundred thousand years of human history did not know this category. Your great-grandmother, your grandmother, even your mother did not know it either. And — interestingly — no generation born before the invention of Pampers had, statistically, more urological, intestinal or emotional problems than today’s three-year-olds in diapers.
The maths of a single pack of diapers
Since we are already having this conversation, let’s also look at it like adults.
Try, next time, in a supermarket or in an online shop, to pay attention to something very simple — to the structure of prices and pack sizes.
Size 1 diapers — for newborns — are usually sold in small packs of 24, 28 pieces, and per single piece they are expensive. Promotions on them are sporadic.
Size 5, 6, 7 diapers — for two-, three-, four-year-olds — are sold in “jumbo,” “mega,” “mega box” packs of one hundred, two hundred, sometimes three hundred pieces. Per unit they are clearly cheaper. And there are almost always promotions on them — sales, multipacks, loyalty programs.
That is not a coincidence. It is a deliberate economic strategy. The longer children stay in diapers, the more customers. The more customers, the more aggressively they have to be retained in the system. The adult accountant sitting in the corporation that produces those diapers knows this perfectly. The mother who buys a two-hundred-piece pack with a twenty-percent discount receives the signal that this is normal — because if they make packs like this, it means many parents must still be buying many of those diapers.
I’m saying this not to blame anyone. I’m saying it so you can see that it is not only you who is deciding when to take the diaper off your child. The entire market is working very hard on your delay.
What early potty training actually looks like (step by step)
Now the concrete part. Because everything I wrote above makes no sense if you don’t see what it looks like from the practical side.
This is how I potty-trained my own children.
1. Observation in the first months. From the start I paid attention to the signals — the “focused” face, a characteristic posture, sounds. The same as a mother in a village. You do not need any special training for this — it is enough to look, and not to pretend you cannot see it.
2. Sitting on the potty in response to a signal, not under pressure. Around the ninth month, when the child is already crawling, you can begin to regularly sit them on a potty — when we see there is a need. Not “every two hours regardless of anything.” Simply at the moment when the face says “now.” Position: little feet on the floor, back straight, belly free. The entire excretory system then works in line with anatomy.
3. Repetition and calm. The next time, the same thing. And again. And again. Without excitement, without applause, without anger if it didn’t work. This is not a circus performance. This is a ritual. At some point — perhaps after two weeks, perhaps after two months — the child begins to look for your eyes themselves when the need comes. That is the moment when the child’s brain has connected body, signal and place.
4. The diaper comes off gradually. First during the day, at home. Then on short outings. Then for whole days. Night-time sleep with a diaper usually stays longer — and that is fine. We are talking about a bladder, not an exam.
5. Accepting “accidents” as information, not failure. If it didn’t work — we missed something in our observation, the child was tired, too many stimuli happened. Cloth, change, next time we try again. No drama.
That’s all. No “three days naked at home” program, no “special reward stickers,” no “I have to buy six books about potty training.” Observation, invitation, repetition, calm.
This is not training. It is an invitation into contact with one’s own body
Early potty training is sometimes mistaken for pressure, harshness, “forcing the child.” Let me say it clearly: it is the exact opposite.
Sitting a nine-month-old child on a potty in response to their own signal is the most respectful thing we can do for their body. We give them the message: “I see you, I hear your body, I am helping you learn to manage it.”
A diaper that we keep on the child because “they are not ready yet” communicates something very different: “I do not trust you, I am not observing you, your body is for me a problem to postpone until later.”
Early potty training is not against the child. Early potty training is on the side of the child — of their skin, their anatomy, their habits, their independence, their dignity.
An appeal — out of care, not judgment
I know this text may be difficult for you. If your child is three years old and still wears a diaper — please, do not read this as an accusation. Read it as an invitation.
You did not have straightforward information. You had a pediatrician who said “give them time.” You had a manufacturer who told you that a size 6 diaper is normal. You had friends who “only now” got around to it. You had your own exhaustion and evenings when you had no strength for the potty. All of these things are understandable.
But if your child is six, nine, twelve months old — please, do not let this text be just another one that you only read. Sit the child on a potty. Once a day. Without a goal, without expectations. Watch them. Learn to read them. See what happens.
And if your child is two, three years old and still wears a diaper — please, do not give up. Do not wait “until they want to themselves,” because you spent three years teaching them that they don’t have to want to. Start with a potty placed in the bathroom, with a conversation, with a few minutes a day. Come back together to the process that is still possible.
I am doing this not to reproach you with anything. I am doing it because I am deeply concerned about children who, for more than two years, wear plastic, warmed, chemical packaging on the most delicate parts of their body — and because we still do not know what impact this contraption has on their young, still-developing bodies. By the time we find out, it will be too late for our generation of children.
But for the generation being born now — it is still not.
About the author
Katarzyna Lis — founder of MOC Montessori Nursery and Preschool in the Białołęka district of Warsaw, where she works day-to-day as a teacher in the preschool group. She holds a degree in elementary education of Montessori Pedagogy, a qualification as a daytime caregiver, and a certificate in Catechesis of the Good Shepherd — a combination that reflects her holistic approach to the development of the child: their body, emotions, relationships, independence and inner world.
In her everyday work with children she does not “run activities” — she accompanies. She creates a space in which the child’s development happens naturally, at their own rhythm, and where the adult is there to look carefully and respond. The same philosophy — observation and response to the child’s signals — underpins her approach to potty training.
Privately, a mother of four, combining the experience of motherhood with a passion for her work. This text was written for Dzieckologia as a practitioner’s voice — from the perspective of a Montessori institution that has, for years, looked at the child as a competent person from the very first months of life.
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Katarzyna Lis
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