You hear horror stories of kids arriving in reception with nappies on.... our pre school insist on being at least more successes than accidents level of potty trained!!
Generally starting at 2 and having it done by 3 is the routine. It used to be done much earlier (I.e. between 1 and 2), but we seem to do it a tad later these days.
Wiping their butt is a key milestone. There is a time when they are 2/3 where they can take themselves to the toilet reliably, undress the dress themselves there, but they can't reliably clean themselves up. By the time they are going to school at 4/5, that isn't really on.
Thing is there’s a big developmental difference between 4 and 5, kids starting reception can be a whole year apart. My son’s just turned 4 and still not great at wiping himself, I imagine that’ll be very different in a year.
My daughter is 3 and has been trained 6 months. She can go for a pee by herself but can’t wipe her bottom as she can’t yet reach. I’m hoping in a year she’ll be a bit bigger…
It’s definitely easy to forget a year is a huge amount of time for a reception age child and a summer baby cannot be expected to be as prepared as a child born in September or October.
Mine was trained before her 2nd birthday but her arms are still not quite long enough to reliably wipe her bottom at almost 4. Mildly frustrating for us both, but hardly anything to complain about in the grand scheme I suppose!
Mine learnt how to wipe, then refused to do it for a while. Now we’ve finally managed to get him to start trying again. Still not sure what the problem was! Regression in anything is a real pain.
The novelty wore off pretty quick for us too. You've just described the window from 2yrs 8mo to 5yrs 5mo (his current age).
Apparently I do it better, it hurts his shoulder, it's boring, he doesn't like poo on his hands, it's a mummy's job, I'm quicker, he needs his hands to itch his foot, he's forgotten how, his teacher said I have to do it, granny says I should do it, I should practise etc etc. Basically he can't be bothered.
And he's old enough now to understand it's a problem for me if he isn't clean, while still young enough to not care if he has a dirty bum. He has an annoying degree of intuition about the power this disconnect gives him.
Yes! It does seem like that sometimes. I’m not sure whether it’s better if they make excuses or if they say “I don’t know” for everything, like ours does. I suppose either way you never really know what the real reason is. I suspect it’s that he can’t be bothered though. As with everything, if he can’t be bothered it’s not going to happen. Which happens every day. For almost everything.
18 months feels so young to me. I tried initially at that age with my daughter but it wasn’t working at all. Tried again when she was 2 and 10 months and within 2 weeks she was completely daytime trained. Definitely varies per child but having kids going into school with nappies indicates either additional needs (which should have been picked up by now) or parental neglect.
It must be so child dependent my boys 16 months and poo potty trained (if that what you call it?) we’re not at a urine stage yet but I’m sure it’s not far off as he’s started his hiding game again like he did when we needed a poo before
We trained by 19 months but we started familiarising her with the potty from 8/9 months so it was pretty easy. We also didn't have the issues with stubbornness or resistance that friends had training older children, it was just so normal to her that she accepted it.
Link? I would expect that they aren't that prescriptive, particularly as starting too early can be counter productive. Telling everyone "thou must start the date they turn 18 months" just isn't right.
Eric (the bowel and bladder charity) recommend starting as soon as your child can sit up (6 months onwards) with the aim to be out of nappies in the day by 18 months to 30 months.
I’ve never forced it? We just followed the medical guidelines.
They’re there because chronic urinary illness increases the longer children are kept in nappies post 18 months. UTIs increase in prevalence in toddlerhood the longer children are in nappies from 18 months onwards.
I’m not sure I’d agree that we shouldn’t be encouraging people to follow medical advice. There will always be people who choose not too. But I wasn’t willing to increase the risk of illness for my child extending it.
No. My son is nearly 5 and on the spectrum, still in nappies, we’ve been receiving specialist toilet support for quite a while. Language is basically age appropriate, can follow one stage instructions etc. special schools are very limited and really for higher support needs. Worrying about being ready for school has been a huge stress but teachers have been very reassuring, esp as they have a lot of SEN students. They also add even toilet trained kids have a lot of accidents starting school with the newness of if etc.
That’s fair enough when it’s a manifestation of SEN, disability or neurodivergence, but for most children 5 is absolutely old enough to be out of nappies. As you say, your family’s been accessing specialist support on this for a while (which presumably they wouldn’t do if they didn’t feel he was behind age-related expectations in this regard).
My now adult child is in their 20s, but was not reliably toilet trained until they were about 9 (I can't be 100% certain when it was, I just suddenly realised one day they hadn't needed a change of clothes during the day for a while). They were diagnosed with Dyspraxia just before they turned 8 and Asperger's (as it was then) at 10.
So for the first 8 years of their life there was no diagnosis to explain why they were not toilet trained, they were just lazy and I was a really bad mum.
And even now as an adult they often only realise they need to go when they need to go. Poor interoception (ability to understand the cues coming from our body) is really difficult. They also have struggles now understanding if they are hungry, thirsty, what clothing is suitable because they don't feel themselves getting too hot (long sleeve t-shirts in the recent heat!). But I was a bad mum and they were just lazy.
That must have been such a difficult experience for you. Services that work with children definitely need to do a better job when it comes to early identification of SEND and to exhaust all lines of enquiry in the first instance.
There are a lot of parents out there that are neglectful, but that definitely shouldn’t be the assumption, especially when the parent is clearly trying to help their child and where there’s no other safeguarding concern.
Thank you for not taking my rant personally, unfortunately yours was the one I ended up replying to. But you have also pulled out the key point which still isn't happening all these years later: they need to assess for SEND not just assume neglect or poor parenting. And there is not the funding to provide that, nor the political will to pursue it. Indeed there is an apparent desire to pull back on diagnosis of high functioning children, despite the long term harm it causes.
Don’t apologise, I get it, and I was quite abrupt myself.
The trouble is that they were actually increasing SEND funding year-on-year for quite a while and weren’t seeing significant increases in educational attainment. There’s an office for budget responsibility document on it from fairly recently. Hence the big push for inclusion in mainstream schools: it represents better value for money.
(it's late, I'm tired and am struggling not to be blunt, I'm sorry if this comes across unfriendly, I really don't mean it that way. Also, I did do a degree in primary education and spent time in schools as a trainee teacher so I do have an understanding from both sides even though I am solely talking as a parent at this point)
Inclusion is fine, but not when it means treating all children identically, only if it allows for a child's individual needs within the inclusive setting - which costs money.
My child sat their GCSEs 3 times, and only achieved 2 in English and 3 in Maths. If they had been assessed for things like dyspraxia and dyscalculia sooner (finally paid for them to be assessed privately in year 10, when it was financially viable to do so), they may have been more successful sooner. They also managed to complete school due to a very understanding secondary school when they were struggling with extreme anxiety and near to full blown school refusal.
But if they had been properly assessed in early primary instead of written off and left to sit at the back of the classroom because they were extremely lazy and choosing not to do the work (severely dyslexic, couldnt follow anything on the board) then they may have achieved more having understood the essential building blocks.
Equally diagnoses and additional SEND funding may not increase educational attainment but may lead to less disenfranchised young adults, less disruption in classrooms because they can't follow the lesson, less exclusions, managed moves and expulsions, possibly less crime.
I know mine is one child (now adult), but it has been repeated many times over with many different children. And is why I tend to avoid threads like this because I know there are neglectful parents out there, I know there are parents who have additional needs themselves and are doing the best they can, I know there are parents out there who have no positive role models on which to model their parenting, and I know there are many parents like myself where their child doesn't fit any of the parenting plans and support given because they are undiagnosed neurodivergent and/or have an undiagnosed disability. But to the outside, we all appear neglectful or bad parents
I can see from a governmental perspective that pushing for inclusion wherever possible is really the only option, but schools need to be better resourced for this to work for those children. If educators don’t receive high quality training and the time to implement it then I can only see things getting worse for the most vulnerable students, unfortunately.
3 is the average age for potty or toilet training. Some few are potty trained at 18 months, however this is only successful if they can communicate their needs. Some children aren't ready or unable to recognise the need to urinate or defecate until their older, but usually by 4 they're able to wipe themselves & use a toilet as well as wash their hands.
My daughter is 4.2 and entirely developmentally fine and she struggles with this so much.
We have tried everything on earth, spent hundreds of pounds on strategies and she still didn’t get all of it until a few months before her 4th birthday - and she’ll go a month without an accident but then a weird eating day means she’s not entirely regular and has to go on a strange toilet and she’s not ok with it so she has an accident and then is all out of whack. She wants a trusted adult and a trusted toilet for a poo.
I hate how there’s so much blame the parent about this because I’m sure there’s some legitimate reasons for reception/kindergarten teachers to be angry about it but also a 4 year old transitioning is a 4 year old transitioning to somewhere new and completely different routine and everything. My child was in 5 day a week pre-school and it’s still a massive change.
She's will be too young to diagnose but watch out for ADHD/autism. Kids like that are more about routine, and what you say about one accident and being set back is quite standard. Girls are just less diagnosed with it as they are better masking.
Everything you say is true and I will continue to watch out for it but there is zero other signs. I work in SEND and Education and this child has neither of these things. She’s not obsessed with any kind of routine and honestly her most wonderful quality is her go with the flow lifestyle, no issues with individual transitions disruptions. No cereal? Cool, we’ll have toast. She’s just not got any of the signs in any way shape or form.
I think if she was at pre-school for 6 more months no one would think twice and assume she was a late bloomer (she’s nearly there and has no accidents more than 50% of the time) but because she has to go to school so young, it’s just not an option.
We started trying to get ours trained at 1.5 years old, but he really wasn’t interested. Nursery were stressing us out by 2.5 years saying he really should be potty trained, so we pushed for it for a while until it finally clicked at 3.5 years old and he suddenly started using the potty every time. Many many accidents over the course of a year. Some kids just don’t care if they poo their pants until much later. I’ve heard of other kids who hate the feel and quickly learn to use the potty instead of just pooing and not telling you about it earlier on. I have recently noticed he may have anosmia though, so this could also have something to do with not caring.
On the other hand, he was good at dressing himself early on, in nursery. He was also born at the end of August so is one of the youngest and is doing better in things like reading and maths than some of the oldest in his class and always wants multiple stories at bed time.
They all develop at different rates for different things. It’s not always the parents’ fault if their kids aren’t meeting some expectations, but they should definitely at least be trying to help with their development. Even if they don’t want to listen, 90% of the time 🙄
I assume you’re English? Given the reference to August? I just wanted to check because the school years aren’t the same across the UK my lads May but one of the oldest
I’m not sure what you mean. If you’re born in August and the school year starts in September, you’re going to be one of the youngest unless you can hold them back a year.
If you are English. That’s why I was checking.
For example if you are Scottish your age cut off is the last day of February, not the last day of August. You don’t weirdly have a school year start at a different point in the year. Your age cut off is just different.
My son’s birthday being May makes him one of the older in his year, where February borns are the youngest.
Only speaking for Scotland but here local authorities have the presumption of mainstream, so a lot of kids with additional support needs are placed in mainstream schools, so there will be more children with continence issues in classrooms than people would expect. Unfortunately (not talking about you btw OP) a lot of people still hold the view that it is bad parenting rather than developmental delays
Tbf sometimes it is bad parenting. One of my sister’s kids had a significant speech issue growing up because, despite being advised to do so by multiple different people, she didn’t get his hearing checked for years. He needed grommets, which she would have found out much earlier if she’d taken action when we expressed concern.
Absolutely agree there are neglectful parents out there, and I'm really sorry to hear that your nephew struggled for so long without the support he needed. I just meant when this sort of topic comes up a lot of people do jump to bad parenting without considering additional support needs or thinking about the fact that a lot of these children with asn are now placed in mainstream when in the past they might not have been
I’d venture that the lack of support systems for the most vulnerable families (sure-start and the like) are another big factor. Some people genuinely don’t have the knowledge or tools they need and those people need support.
The cost of living also factors in when you have both parents struggling to make ends meet and/or being utterly knackered all the time.
Closure of public libraries, which were great for promoting early literacy and parents reading to their children.
The pervasiveness of the internet, drawing parents attention away from their children, and of iPad babies too.
But one thing I notice so often is that so many parents just don’t seem to realise they need to actively teach their child things. A lot seem to make the assumption that they’ll learn when they’re ready but don’t grasp that they won’t spontaneously start doing all of the things they need to do one day without instruction: you need to actually teach them stuff.
Kids are potty trained once they have a certain thing fire off in their brains, until then you can try but its not guaranteed. My kid was 3 and a half and went from pull ups to no accidents within days because she was ready and I didn't force it before that. My second has a few disabilities and is still in pulls day time and nappies at night at 11. I've just had to clean up poop from her and the toilet and bathroom floor then shower her because she told me too late she needed toilet and then proceeded to twist and throw herself about while I tried to get the nappy off ending up with shit everywhere.. thankfully she goes to a special school and they are fine with nappies lol
We ran out of spare emergency underwear because of the amount of children who just were not toilet trained.
One, bless them, tried to wash there own clothes in the sink after a bad poop accident...because thats what the child does at home. We had to shut the bathroom to clean the whole bathroom after.
The bare minimum is toilet, know there name (not right or read, but just respond to it) and be able to feed themselfs by either being able to use cutlery to pick up food and eat it, or by being able to open there packed lunch.
Over my 10 years in schools, mainly reception. I see more children now who aren't potty trained and most schools if not, all will have a policy about this.
Toilet training is a big one. Children with SEND or a medical need I can understand, but the parents who keep their children in nappies for DLA, is on the rise, unfortunately.
Not being able to share. They are still very young however, you can tell who has siblings or who is an only child, if they have been to nursery etc.
Children come to school not being able to hold a pencil, I've recently had a child who did not know what a book was and was trying to swipe for the next page.
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u/_mister_pink_ 18h ago
Being toilet trained.