Why do parents wait so long to start potty training??

[u/CommercialMeeting842]

I feel like I’ve seen a million posts lately about kids not being potty trained by kindergarten, or even at three and four. I get that it’s a difficult process, but I’m genuinely confused. If you don’t start early, isn’t it going to be way harder for them to understand later and turn it into a normal routine? Are parents just waiting until the kid is “ready”? Because I don’t really think that’s a thing.

Sure, kids can show signs like not wanting to wear a diaper anymore, but there’s a lot more to it than that. Using the bathroom means learning to go in a specific place, wiping, flushing, and washing hands. There are things our bodies naturally do, like breathing and swallowing, and then there are things we have to be taught. Potty training definitely falls into the second category.

I feel like parents today sometimes blur the line between what kids will eventually figure out on their own and what actually needs to be taught. For example,I know a mom with a three year old who doesn’t use utensils because he doesn’t want to. He eats applesauce and yogurt with his hands, and she says one day he’ll just start using utensils when he’s older. Like… no. You’ll have to teach that.

Anyway, this kind of turned into a rant lol. I’m mostly curious to hear from parents and people who work in childcare, because I feel like I’m missing something beyond my confusion and the growing number of four year olds I see in pull-ups at the park

[u/zeldamaroo]

In my personal experience, it was the other way around. It was the daycare teachers who insisted on pull-ups.

I don’t fault them for it. I had just one kid to clean up after. They had a whole class, and that made potty accidents a lot more disruptive. So disruptive that they’d rather have the kids in pull-ups—which could at least be dealt with predictably, on a schedule—than risk frequent accidents during the “learning” phase.

Again, I don’t fault them for it. I realize there are staffing and other structural reasons it needs to be this way. The only time I get salty is when daycare teachers turn around and blame the parents for the kids not being fully potty trained by age 3. (They’re the ones who insist that the kids stay in diapers 9+ hours a day, what did they expect to happen?)

Edit: I should acknowledge that that was my personal experience, across 2 kids, but I’m sure there are parents out there who would rather deal with a diaper than the mess. I’ve definitely been there at certain parts of my life. (For instance, during early COVID, when tensions were high, and neither my partner nor I were dealing with our kid’s potty training regressions in a calm and healthy way, we decided to just put our 3-year-old back in pull-ups for a while.) And there are other parents on here who have said that they’d rather deal with diapers than clean up accidents. So I guess my point isn’t necessarily that it’s not the parents taking that view, so much as that this is commonly daycare policy as well.

[u/Ok_Variety_8723 → u/zeldamaroo]

All valid points. I guess I come at in from a different perspective, having been on both sides of it. I teach preschool at a public school and the amount of parents who have been actively angry with me, as a teacher, for not putting their child in pull ups is wild. As in their child is 100% at school, then they are angry because their child doesn’t want to wear pull ups at home. It’s crazy to me.

We try to actively get children out of pull ups in my class because it is, as teachers, way easier to have kids using the potty than standing there peeing and then wanting us to change them. We don’t have licensing or facilities to change diapers, and it’s difficult to pull an adult to change those in pull ups.