Book Review: Diaper Free
I was recommended the book Diaper Free: The Gentle Wisdom of Natural Infant Hygiene (Ingrid Bauer) by a number of parents on an email list in which I participate. At first the idea of Natural Infant Hygiene (NIH), or Elimincation Communication (EC) as it is often called, totally grossed me out - after all, aren’t babies and diapers part and parcel?
I figured it couldn’t hurt to read the book and maybe it would give me some interesting things to try with Gwen, so I picked it up from my library and dove into it. People, I love this book!
The idea behind NIH is that babies are born with the ability to consciously relax their bodies and urinate or defecate just like an older child or adult, but that we train them to use a diaper instead. From pages 98-99:
“Elimination Communication begins with the baby’s awareness of subtle sensations, which indicate the filling of the bladder. The baby may then signal the parent, or the parent may anticipate the need through timing or intuition. The parent holds the child over a receptacle and make a familiar sound. The child then voluntarily relaxes and releases the urine before the bladder has become uncomfortably full. Over time, as muscles strengthen and conscious control increases, the baby is able to retain and hold in larger quantities of urine for longer periods of time if necessary. This occurs gradually with no particular focus or effort as a natural and inevitable consequence. About the time the sphincter muscles fully develop, the diaper-free baby achieves consistent continence.”
Bauer then goes on to contrast this with conventional potty training, in which a child has learned to pee in its diaper only when the bladder is very full and it cannot hold any more urine. When we then ask that child to begin using a toilet or potty to urinate in, he or she must contract the sphincter muscles and make it to the potty or toilet to release the urine. These kids just literally don’t sense the subtler signals that their bladder is sending to their brain in order to pee voluntarily before the bladder is full until much later than the toilet learning has begun.
I think one of the most interesting things I learned in this book is about the differences between the Western world’s concept of ‘toilet readiness’ - that a child cannot possibly toilet train before at least 18 months because they don’t have the ability - and the Eastern world’s belief that children are quite able to communicate effectively about their elimination needs. I enjoyed this quote a whole lot - from pages 70-71:
“One of the most glaring problems with the concept of toilet training readiness is its heavy ethnocentric focus. The “readiness” theory can only even begin to be considered viable if one pretends that the vast majority of the non-Western world does not exist … Millions of mothers around the globe know that babies are “ready” and aware from birth. The empirical evidence is overwhelming and stretches back for eons. Why has the experience of the majority of the world’s mothers and babies been ignored for so long? Are only modern North American and European babies subject to this maturational lag?”
The book then describes the suspicious timing of the release of scientific literature to promote the ‘toilet readiness’ theory by Dr. Brazelton during the year the first disposable diapers - Pampers - were released. Not to mention that Dr. Brazelton happened to sit for a time on the Pampers Parenting Institute Pediatric Roundtable. Coincidence? I happen to think not!
The book is filled with stories and instructions as to how best support your child’s elimination - whether you start at birth, after a few months, or start later with a toddler. I’m planning to start pretty early with Love Bug - we’ll see how it goes!
Here are some other resources for learning about NIH:
