The Huffington Post ran a recent article by Dr. Steve Hodges claiming that infant potty training is dangerous because it leads to chronic holding, which leads to constipation, which leads to bed wetting. I found significant holes in his reseach, and he tries to extrapolate his data to say that infant potty training is bad! His research is based on a study done on 30 of his urology clinic patients ages 5-15, with the average age of 9 WITH NO DATA ON AGE OF POTTY TRAINING INITIATION, yet he makes a claim that early potty training is dangerous. This is very dangerous for the IPT and EC communities and outreach! I posted a full rebuttal here! Please, please share or speak out against this article to mitigage the damage he's done!

Hi fellow book clubers! Many thanks Alicia firstly for the suggestion of this book - I probably wouldn't have bought and read this if it weren't as part of the book club, so thank you. I've read it and WOW! It really blew my mind! Especially as at the beginning I was a bit resistent to the idea, and fearful. It's my social conditioning- in our society these ideas are seen as hippy and totally unconventional- and even harmful, unfortunately. However in many-even most- of the planet's countries, being diaper free is normal. The premise and philosophy underlining the book is very appealing- Ingrid repeatedly says that diaplerlessness should be one part of overall responsive attachment parenting e.g. holding in-hands, breastfeeding -and not one outcome. Actually she often says being diaper free shouldn't be about the outcome but the process. Being a responsive, caring, patient parent is what it's about- not competitively reducing diaper use. I appreciate that. I learned a lot about parenting in a child-centered way, and wow, is our parenting in the West parent-centered or what..The short parent time off work after birth is one major example. It really opened my mind and will enable me to be a more responsive parent and adult in a child's life. I like the way she talks about night feeds- instead of focusing on the lateness, just turn the clock to the wall and look at the moon and stars with your little one. Beautiful! I've so much more to say but I'll stop there! Amazing read, loads of tips for diaperless flirts to diaperless superheros :-) Thank you. Hugs from Slovakia xx

I don't have kids but this is a great way to potty train your baby. I have always thought that diapers were gross and the rashes and infections caused by plastic diapers is so toxic. If any of you Moms are interested in an eco friendly natural laundry detergent which is fragrance free, I can tell them where to go. There is a petition going around that Tide Free and Clear is causing cancer in kids. I have been using this company's eco friendly products made with tea tree oil and natural ingredients for 20 years.

And I saw someone do it part-time, when they weren't working. It worked pretty well. I think it's kind of like the baby learns to expect that the parents WILL pay attention to those needs, maybe their other caretaker won't. Might work out, might make them more frustrated with the diaper though. Anyway, for the person who said most parents probably stop after one year, my best friend also did EC with her two girls, same ages as my kids now. We never saw any reason to stop! Yes, more accidents happened as they started being fascinated by all there was to do when they could move around on their own but they grew out of it and I just took my kids every 20 minutes or so to prevent an accident since they weren't paying attention much.

Too many posts about babies, birth, and parenting lately. I'm so happy for all you mommy's and mommy's-to-be, but I can't seem to relate to this website lately.

When I have children, I'd love to do this, but I know I won't have the ability to stay home with my kids. I wish the US valued the job of full-time parenting more and treated it as a real job with pay, but as two working/middle-class citizens, my wife and I are just not going to have the choice. Cloth diapers for us, I guess!

As a natural mama, I so wanted ECing to work. We also started at 6 months with our son. It went pretty well up until about 10 or 11 months. Then, it just got very impractical. I was dealing with a new explorer, crawler, walker, who just wanted to play! When you try interrupting a child at this age from their activities, they do not like it! So, the whole thing just got very frustrating for both sides. As I felt myself admitting that I was upset that it wasn't working as "perfectly" as diaper free advocates made it seem, I gave it up. And it was definitely for the better. I also noticed that so many of the ECing blogs, stop just around 1 year. This led me to believe it stopped working for them. So, definitely go ahead and save some diapers for a few months, but don't get down when you see it come to a grinding halt!

My son who is now 2 and a 1/2 still successfully potty trained at just over 2 all on his own. Even though he was back in diapers from 11 months (of course we still did many diaper free days when we were home, but i accepted the fact that there would be many pees on the floor!), he still easily transitioned to the potty.

Good luck if you continue you with this route!

Regarding the book "Diaper Free" by Ingrid Bauer... Reading Alicia's blog sparked my curiosity, I was ready to buy the book to see what this is all about, while searching to find an online store where it is sold at a acceptable price (the average price for the printed edition was almost 75$, I seen it sold for the ridiculous 340$), I found that good parts of it was available for free on the Google Books website. I read a few pages, and in my opinion overall what the author say seem to be interesting, but most if it seem evident to me, and she's basically radical in her ideas like the skin-to-skin approach when we're carrying our baby... As far as I'm concerned there's no real need to buy that book, using common sense and being reasonable is enough... Reasonable persons could use it as a convincing tool however, like "look my dear they advise to do it this way in that book"... They bring some evident ideas like the fact that it's not practical and against the whole idea of it to plan the bathroom breaks in advance... Personally if I were a baby I would not like to be naked all day as the author advise, wearing a long T-shirt (and some underwears) are a minimum... I will continue reading part of it later and tomorrow, maybe the author bring some other interesting ideas...

I do like you laid back approach to EC. I knew a mom who did it and she was pratically a slave to her child which did not hold any appeal to me at all. It does seem that if you really want to do EC, you have to either be with your child 24/7 or have a great support system that is willing to do all that work as well. I can understand the appeal of EC, but I was also very lucky that my first born child potty trained herself in one day at age 2 1/2. My second daughter wasn't as easy but I really just let her take the lead and never yelled or anything, although I would get frustrated at times. As a wise preschool administrator once said, she has yet to see a child go to kindergarten in diapers. We parents can get too preoccupied with potty training, and it shouldn't be such a source of distress for all those involved.

When my son was an infant, my brother in law from India said that this is essentially how kids were raised there; in poorer villages, the kids went around bare-bottomed and instead of a potty, were just taken to the outside facililties, whatever that might have been. It made sense to me, but 30 years ago, there was no support for trying to practice this in the US, and I probably would have been turned over to child services. If you can make it work, go for it! I don't find the "modern" solution of yelling and crying and frustration and diaper rash all that modern.

I don't have a baby, but I've been babysitting my 2 yr old neice since her mom died a few months ago and she wasn't potty trained. No matter how much I tried to train her, she refused to coropate. So Last month I started leaving her diaper off for awhile, so she can get accustomed to listening to her body (just like your article said). She is doing much better now, holding it until she uses her toilet..now I just have to get her to let me know when she has to go. I usually sit on on the toilet every 15 min., hopefully she'll start letting me know soon. i fullly believe in this method, even for a toddler.

There is an African tribe that trains their children by whistling while they hold the baby over the toilet. After a while, the babies are trained to go on cue. I let my little boy go bare butt around the house and he was very easy to train. We did have accidents, but they were cleaned up and he figured out what he needed to do.