Potty training

What readiness actually looks like

Staying dry for longer stretches, noticing they have done something, taking an interest in what adults and other children do, and being able to manage the clothing at least partly. Age is a poor guide and the range among perfectly ordinary children is enormous.

It is not a race and there is no correlation worth caring about between finishing early and anything else. A child trained at two and a half and a child trained at three and a half are indistinguishable at five.

Where a child is well past the usual range and showing none of the signs, we will raise it with you — gently, once — because occasionally there is something else going on and it is better looked at than waited out.

How we actually do it

You decide when to start and we follow, or occasionally the other way round when a child begins here and we tell you. Either way it is one approach in both places, because a child doing it one way at home and another here is being given two problems.

Pants rather than pull-ups during the day once you have started, because a child who cannot feel it cannot learn from it. Several changes of clothes from home, and no comment made to the child about any of it.

Accidents are cleaned up matter-of-factly and are never mentioned to the child as a disappointment. This is the whole technique. A child who has been made to feel bad about an accident starts holding on, and holding on is a genuinely harder problem than starting late.

Regression, which is normal

A new sibling, a house move, a change of room, an illness, a bad fortnight — all of these commonly produce a few weeks of going backwards, and it does not mean starting again.

We treat it as information rather than as a setback. A child who was reliable in March and is not in May is telling us something, and the useful response is to find out what rather than to reinstate a chart.

No reward charts and no stickers. They work briefly, they make the whole thing about the adult's approval, and they leave nothing behind when they stop.

Who changes your child, and what is recorded

Every adult who does personal care here has cleared a criminal history check, a check of the Statewide Central Register and a check against the Justice Center Staff Exclusion List, all of it completed before they had unsupervised contact with any child.

Changing happens in a designated area within sight of the room rather than behind a closed door, which is a deliberate safeguarding arrangement rather than a matter of convenience.

Every change and every toilet visit goes in the daily note. It is one of the few genuinely useful pieces of data a nursery can give you and it is precisely the sort of thing a photo stream does not carry.