Ready or not

After 12 months of slinging diapers day and night, most parents begin to long for some deliverance, some break from the tyranny of the infant digestive system. Yet starting a child on toilet training early -- before age 2, as many parents do -- often backfires, pediatricians have reported.

“In most cases there’s no clear benefit to starting the training before 24 to 27 months,” said Dr. Nathan Blum, a behavioral pediatrician at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, “and in fact kids who start early often take longer to finish.”

Blum and two of his colleagues, Dr. Bruce Taubman and Dr. Nicole Nemeth, began tracking the training schedules of 378 of their patients, toddlers between 17 and 19 months old. In about 40% of the families, parents introduced their children to a potty stool before or right after their 2nd birthday and soon began frequently urging the little ones to try it. The rest of the families started their campaigns when their children were 27 months or older. A year later, the results are in: The children who began training before or just after their second birthday needed at least 10 and as many as 16 months before they were walking around safely without a diaper. Those who started after age 27 months were dry in five to nine months. As with music and math, some youngsters do appear to have a gift, however. In 81 of the families followed, children learned to use the potty without much urging or instruction from their parents. And they learned early -- before age 3 in most cases. If you’ve got one of those, who’s curious and ready, pediatricians say, then by all means take the hint. It’s not just the child who’ll be walking around clean and dry.

The study appears in April’s journal Pediatrics.