Potty Training
NOW FREE: 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.
US government public health policy stated that potty training should be initiated by three months at the latest, despite this being well before conscious control of the muscles was even possible—a process that depended on the coating of nerve tracts known as myelinisation, which occurs much later, from around 15 to 18 months. This Pavlov-style practice was advocated by popular magazines at the time—which encouraged potty training from the second day after birth—and considered perfectly normal. It relied on learning by association, perhaps with positive or negative reinforcement: encouragement and praise, or blame and punishment if things did not go according to plan. By three months, it was assumed to work, with no dirty ‘napkins’ and a clean child.
At the same time, social commentators noted how the very idea of a ‘clean baby’ was gaining more and more media attention, as if this were what was required for a child to be lovable. Just as one’s home had to be kept spotless, so children had to be shiny and clean. And with this, of course, came judgement: a child would be evaluated as ‘good’ or ‘bad’—like the parent—depending on whether they were clean or dirty.
As the Chichester gathering noted, the issue here wasn’t just whether a baby could be potty trained at one month, but how the success or failure of this project would be judged—and how this judgement would be conveyed to the child. What effect would it have to be deemed ‘bad’ from the start of life, and to have ‘failed’ at an important task? Or to have one’s worth equated with producing a bowel movement for someone else?
Bodily practices involve complex interactions between adults and children, with certain sites on the body becoming what Harry Stack Sullivan called ‘zones of interaction’: points where adults make their demands felt on the infant’s body. Pooing and peeing at the right time can thus become a template for behaving well or badly, for complying or resisting, for accepting or refusing the very notion of a routine or schedule, with the bodily products themselves becoming infused with meaning—as toxic, evil, or dangerous.
These qualities can then extend to the child’s whole character. In a once-common custom, parents would wipe their sleeping child’s lips on New Year’s Eve with toilet paper, as if to wipe away all the bad things that might have been said in the year that has passed. The abstract value of saying a bad thing is translated here into the concrete image of wiping away excrement, showing how the drama of potty training has a far wider scope than the literal use of the potty.
When analysts talk about the anal phase, they tend to mean something like this: patterns that most probably begin before actual potty training become linked to it, developing into broader vectors in life. Potty training itself is like a stage on which conflicts are played out or renounced. This is the time, after all, when the child starts to assert their will against their parents, and since sphincter control represents a considerable step in self-mastery, it tends to be associated with autonomy and independence. The child can refuse the demand to poo or pee at the prescribed moment, and the parents are usually unable to force compliance—unless, that is, it becomes the child’s choice. Hence, traits such as autonomy, stubbornness, and compliance are taken to crystallise around this time. Sphincter control becomes the child’s prize possession because it is theirs alone.
It has often been pointed out that the choice between resistance and compliance depends on which of two forces is stronger: anger or fear. If fear trumps anger, the result is compliance, setting a template, perhaps, for a life in which the demands of others come first—sometimes called ‘people-pleasing’. If anger trumps fear, defiance and opposition take centre stage, an attitude that may prove self-sabotaging later on, as positive encounters and opportunities may be rejected because they are experienced as demands—and so must be stubbornly denied.
Latent in both of these positions is its opposite. If fear trumps anger, anger is still there, repressed in the background; if anger trumps fear, a more hidden fear remains present, even if not consciously felt. Someone can spend their life saying yes to others while resenting this at a deeper level, just as they may oppose and resist others, their apparent autonomy masking a terror either of bodily damage to themselves or of the damage their anger might cause to another person. These contradictions can shed light on both the eruptions of fury in the usually meek people-pleaser, and the spells of depression and panic in the more independent decision-maker.
This inherent tension is only compounded by the paradoxical injunctions of most Western societies: the child must be obedient and compliant, yet also assertive and independent, valued as an individual who can make up their own mind.
Brilliant, Darian!