War of the Diapers

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With all the unsettled issues dominating the news lately, from the Middle East peace process to the Clinton impeachment to Saddam Hussein's defiance, Americans hardly need something new to worry about. Yet that's just what they got on Page One of the New York Times last week. Under the headline TWO EXPERTS DO BATTLE OVER POTTY TRAINING came the unwelcome assertion that baby-boom parents may be taking exactly the wrong approach to this crucial milestone in child rearing.

That, at least, is the view of psychologist and child-care guru John Rosemond, who laid out his complaints in a series of columns published in more than 100 newspapers last month. And superficially at least, his arguments seem to make sense. For more than a generation, observes Rosemond, experts like Dr. T. Berry Brazelton have advised parents to let kids decide for themselves when to make the transition from diapers to potty. As a result, the age of toilet training has risen dramatically--as has the incidence of constipation, bladder-control problems and other potty-related ills.

Just as bad, argues Rosemond, is the psychological damage inflicted by wishy-washy parents. "The issue," he says, "is the mother's ability to give up the role of caretaker and become an authority figure." If that transition is delayed much beyond the age of two, says Rosemond, the child won't mature properly and will probably develop behavior problems later in life.

What makes the whole thing so silly, he says, is that toilet training can be a snap if you use the technique he calls "naked and $75." You remove the diaper, put a portable potty within reach of your two-year-old and wait for the inevitable accident. "Kids that age hate to have 'it' running down their legs," Rosemond explains. "So they stop the flow, and you lead them to the seat. The $75 is for cleaning the carpet." Within a few days, he says, the child is trained--and knows who's boss. "This technique is not my idea," says Rosemond. "This is the way grandma trained her children."

Well, yeah, says Brazelton, professor emeritus at Harvard Medical School and chairman of the Pampers Parenting Institute. That's the trouble. Back in the early '60s, Brazelton was distressed by the amount of bed-wetting and deliberate fecal retention he was seeing in his patients. So he asked mothers to try something new: let kids decide for themselves when to take the potty plunge.

"By giving the child a sense of autonomy," says Brazelton, "we reduced the incidence of problems from the national average of 8% to about 1%." Brazelton's results, reported in the journal Pediatrics, transformed the way most parents do toilet training. Even the term was recast as the kinder, gentler "toilet teaching."