They Say: Just Potty Train Already
The booming potty training pants industry was just dealt a big blow by researchers. It turns out dragging your feet on potty training can have long-term negative impacts on your kids.
The research out of Rutgers University in New Jersey points to waiting until after the thirty-two-month mark leads to incontinence issues that can last into the tweens.
Published in the new issue of the Journal of Pediatric Urology, the study surmises the best time to potty train is between twenty-seven months (shortly after the second birthday) and thirty-two months (before they reach age three). Waiting too long, they found, was linked to “urge incontinence,” a problem defined by the National Institutes of Health as “leakage of urine due to bladder muscles that contract inappropriately.”
Often associated with older men with an enlarged prostate, bladder infections, stones or nervous system issues, in children it manifests itself through a mix of bed wetting and daytime wetting of their pants.
Traditionally, that urge to go to the bathroom is something kids can learn to control as they’re potty training. Their brain is able to develop the means to prevent bladder contractions, and they make it to the bathroom in time to urinate. But in the study, researchers found waiting too long meant the children did not sufficiently develop that ability to prevent the contractions. The kids continued to have urge incontinence issues up through age twelve.
This is bad news for the parents who tout their child-led potty training methods that still have the child in disposable pants at age four – and if you hadn’t noticed, there are plenty of them out there. We know it’s not convenient to take a week off and sit in the house with a naked toddler, but it could save you a lot of laundry – and your kid a lot of embarrassment – in the long run. And should we even start calculating the environmental impact of a little speed up on your part?
Oh, and before you start bragging about your six-month-old who pees on the potty like a pro, the report notes the extra, extra early crowd isn’t helping their kids either. Instead, the researchers point to that specific window – between twenty-seven and thirty-two months – as a pretty solid window for training.
Even better news for those of you who are still worried about getting this whole process started (and hence putting it off as long as possible): the method didn’t matter so much as the timing. So whether you’re the loosey goosey type up for child-led training (and lots of naked time) or you’re more regimented, you can make it happen.
Just put down the pull ups, and no one will get hurt.
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I always thought pull ups were bad news…you’re either trained or you ain’t.
Interesting…but I’m not sure I get the connection between training pants/pull-ups (which fall in the category of “method” in my mind) and timing of initiation of training. To me, while using pull-ups may lengthen the time between initiation of toilet training and completion (I think this depends on the individual child, actually), this study seems to be linking the timing of the start of training and the potential for these later problems.
Or am I missing something? We used pull-ups with our first (and it seemed to take a while, but I’m not sure another method would have been easier/quicker/better…long-story-short, our son met pretty much all of the toilet training milestones in a completely different order than we had read was the most common), and we’re looking at starting to train our second in a few months.
Also, I’m interested in the correlation-vs-causation aspects of this…is it possible that kids who are destined to have these problems later in childhood are trained later because they seem ready later than other kids because of these very problems? Just wondering…
Louise – I was wondering about correlation vs. causation also. When he was a little over 2 years old I tried some serious potty training. Basically, he walked around the house with no pants for a week. What I got was a lot of pee on the ground and a severely constipated child. It seems like kids just have different times when they are ready.
I agree that the child has to be ready, but there seems to be one major thing against pullups that I have seen…at least in the first version of from my babysitting, not momming, days: the kid doesn’t know they’re wet, as opposed to traditional cloth training pants with the plastic cover, where they darn well know that they are.
Yes, starting potty training during the optimal window is essential to making potty training a smooth and pleasant process for both parent and child. And pullups are for the birds.
Yeah, we’re definitely considering going pullup-free for DS#2, but with DS#1…well…the problem was never “wetness,” shall we say (he mastered that part very quickly, and was OK overnight from the start). The main advantage of pullups for him was that, when they were dirty, they were much easier to remove than traditional training pants without a lot of mess, but still allowed him to pull them down himself when he used the toilet.
And, when they are in the right age window, there are ways to “push” them, bribes and lots of big celebrations helped us, and the first time, I had to MAKE her stay on the potty til she peed in it so she would understand the deal. We just watched a DVD and drank water for 20 minutes. Too many folks I know are a little too laissez faire about it, for my tastes…like, they’ll do it when they’re ready, etc. etc….yeah, OK, but you know, by 3, you MAKE them ready unless they have some kind of developmental or physical problem. Just my 2 cents. Pull ups kind of only prolong the middling stage. We had a couple embarassing moments…”clean up in aisle 3″ at the grocery store (not kidding, but just pee, not poop) but, it’s no big deal.
I used Pull Ups only at night, but to ensure they were really to protect the sheets and not to affect her feeling urine, we put them on outside of real underwear.
To be honest, we used the same pull up for months because I used night dryness in her diaper as my cue to start training (around age 2), but just a tip out there for parents who want to use them for convenience but don’t want them to hinder training.
GP – I also tried making my son sit on the potty until he peed. He went absolutely nuts, and just cried and fussed. He has never been one who liked to sit still for very long. I agree with pushing some, but I’m not one of those people that can stand screaming for hours, just for my own sanity.
When we tried again around age 3 (definitely out of the window they recommend in this article) it was so much easier. I questioned why I pushed it so much when he was younger.
Yeah, Laure68…I would not have dealt with the screaming, either. I guess my daughter is like me and can be swayed to do just about anything for candy ; )
(I know lots of people would argue that’s a bad motivator, but she now is beyond expecting the candy and it was just a temporary thing to get her more interested in complying)
Yeah…my understanding from what I’ve read is that bribing kids to motivate them in toilet training is the exception that proves the “don’t use bribes to motivate kids” rule: it’s unlikely they’ll stop using the toilet once the habits are well-established and the bribes stop.
For example, I no longer expect a piece of candy when I use the toilet.
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Last I checked most “child led” potty training naturally occurs between 2-3 years. It certainly did for my first, my second is on his way he’s about 26 months and he now prefers to poop in the potty but hasn’t peed yet.
Also this study probably didn’t differentiate between kids parents tried to “potty train” but the kids couldn’t/didn’t possibly because of physical inability which *shocking* might persist and those of parents who just “waited for the child to do it themself” (which is NOT what child led means)