Potty Training
Sphincter control becomes the child’s prize possession because it is theirs alone
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The internet controversy over potty training—sparked by comments made by Made in Chelsea’s Louise Thompson and Ryan Libbey—has made it very clear how different people have different ideas about how this should be done and when. As well as showing how seemingly natural developmental milestones are hardly as natural as we might think, it reminds us how social forces shape behaviours, and how these can change radically from one historical moment to another, and from one culture to another.
Some years ago, a patient described how her father insisted that all the children in her very large family be potty trained by the age of one. Detailing the horrific strictures, techniques, and punishments used to achieve this goal seemed unreal, like some medieval torture method. The patient explored how this had impacted her later life, and the effects it had produced, both conscious and unconscious.
Yet only some seventy or eighty years ago, it was considered quite normal in many parts of the world to begin potty training before the age of one month. Yes, that’s not a typo—one month. When psychoanalysts, psychologists, and psychiatrists met at the Chichester Conference on Child Mental Health in 1952, they discussed different practices of potty training in their respective countries. It was common practice to hold the baby above a potty immediately before and after every feed, to generate a reflex-type form of potty training.
