Elimination Communication
A nice little article via reddit: It's the bottom line: no nappies, no mess.
It's nice to see this practice(alternately called Infant Potty Training or Elimination Communication) getting a little attention. I only heard about it in August, and thought it was great.
The basic principle of EC is that parents can and should be attuned to the bodily signals of their children, and assist them in eliminating waste. Just as a child communicates hunger, and the parent responds with (breast-)feeding, the child communicates their need to eliminate waste and the parent facilitates that. Often that involved a keyword or sound (eg. 'ssss' for urinating, 'hmmmm' for defacating) once the child is in an appropriate place, (over a toilet or sink or bowl, near bushes or whatever have you).
It's great for a few reasons, I think:
1) It dovetails well with attachment/primal parenting and establishing a deep bond between child and parent.
2) So much less wasteful, even than cloth diapers.
3) It'll be really useful in a collapse environment, when we don't have the resources to divert to disposable diapers or even to constantly cleaning non-disposable ones
4) It's much more hygienic for the child, and doesn't involve the self-renunciation and active ignoring of their bodies that traditional diaper elimination does (EC advocates suggest that even infants are fully cognizant of their bodily functions and have to be taught to ignore them in order to eliminate waste and allow it to accumulate beside their genitals in a diaper. Then later, they have to be taught to re-attune themselves to those functions in order to potty train the standard way.)
Here's my favorite EC page: Free to EC!
And a couple of others: Diaper Free!
Infant Potty Training
What is Infant Potty Training?
It's nice to see this practice(alternately called Infant Potty Training or Elimination Communication) getting a little attention. I only heard about it in August, and thought it was great.
The basic principle of EC is that parents can and should be attuned to the bodily signals of their children, and assist them in eliminating waste. Just as a child communicates hunger, and the parent responds with (breast-)feeding, the child communicates their need to eliminate waste and the parent facilitates that. Often that involved a keyword or sound (eg. 'ssss' for urinating, 'hmmmm' for defacating) once the child is in an appropriate place, (over a toilet or sink or bowl, near bushes or whatever have you).
It's great for a few reasons, I think:
1) It dovetails well with attachment/primal parenting and establishing a deep bond between child and parent.
2) So much less wasteful, even than cloth diapers.
3) It'll be really useful in a collapse environment, when we don't have the resources to divert to disposable diapers or even to constantly cleaning non-disposable ones
4) It's much more hygienic for the child, and doesn't involve the self-renunciation and active ignoring of their bodies that traditional diaper elimination does (EC advocates suggest that even infants are fully cognizant of their bodily functions and have to be taught to ignore them in order to eliminate waste and allow it to accumulate beside their genitals in a diaper. Then later, they have to be taught to re-attune themselves to those functions in order to potty train the standard way.)
Here's my favorite EC page: Free to EC!
And a couple of others: Diaper Free!
Infant Potty Training
What is Infant Potty Training?
posted by Archangel at 8:55 AM
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