Toilet Training the Scientific Way

Whether you call it potty training or potty learning and even if you’ve been practicing elimination communication from the start, if you’re a parent, you won’t be able to avoid the task of teaching your child the proper way to use the toilet. In our home, we have two different potty seats, two potty books, and a potty video. We’ve also got a stock of gummy candies–worms, bears, snakes, dinosaurs, and O’s–as incentive.

We were pretty lucky that our son took to the Safety 1st Potty ‘N Step Stool without much complaint and we’ve found it fairly easy to clean up after he uses it. When we visited Singapore last month, my mother-in-law kindly got him a Safety 1st Easy Learn Potty Trainer. Compared to the Potty ‘N Step Stool, it is a mess to clean up. I would definitely not recommend it.

When we got serious about potty training a few months ago, I happened to be reading about Edward Tufte aka “the da Vinci of data.” He summarized for Scientific American the way he thinks data should be presented and it seemed applicable to toilet training as well.

Presenting the Tufte Toilet Training Method…(1) documenting the sources and characteristics of the data

Pee pee comes from your p*nis, looks like water, and is wet.

Doo doo comes from your b*tth*le and looks like mushy chocolate.

(2) insistently enforcing appropriate comparisons

Babies pee pee and doo doo in diapers.

Big boys pee pee and doo doo in the potty.

(3) demonstrating mechanisms of cause and effect

If you pee pee or doo doo in your diaper, it can get hot, stinky, and uncomfortable. Sometimes, wearing diapers can make your b*tt red and itchy too.

If you pee pee or doo doo in the potty, the pee pee and doo doo won’t stick to your body and you’ll feel fresh and clean all the time.

(4) expressing those mechanisms quantitatively

Every day, we use at least three diapers and many wet wipes to clean up your pee pee and doo doo. They fill up the garbage can and make it very stinky.

Potties and toilets don’t get full because we can flush everything away with clean water.

(5) recognizing the inherently multivariate nature of analytic problems

There are many different kinds of potties and toilets. You have one potty that we put on the floor. You also have a Winnie the Pooh toilet seat that we put on top of the big toilet.

Because you’re just learning and practicing right now, you can try going without a diaper at home and wear one when we go out.

(6) inspecting and evaluating alternative explanations

Boys can pee pee standing up or sitting down. Girls usually sit down.

Yes, you can wear diapers until you’re an old man. That’s your choice. But I think you’ll want to use the potty and diaper because you’re getting to be a big boy now!

The day after I wrote out these steps, our son did his first, self-initiated pee pee on the potty. No prompting, no guidance. I should consider patenting the Tufte Toilet Training Method.