How to Start Potty-Training a One-Year-Old: Elimination Communication

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You’ve just learned that you can potty-train babies and want to know if it’s too late to begin with a toddler between 12-17 months old.  Or, you’ve known for a while that you want to do Elimination Communication, but life happened and you haven’t gotten started yet.  Either way, we’ve got the tools you need to begin!

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Should I do Full-Time EC or Part-Time?

The 12-17 month age range is kind of an in-between period for EC.  You’re heading into toddlerhood, and some babies in this age range are ready to go fully diaper-free (read my 16-month old’s potty-training story here).  Other babies still need time for their bladders to get bigger or for physical or cognitive skills to develop.  Most babies are ready to ditch diapers completely by about 18-24 months.

This guide assumes you want to begin with Elimination Communication on a part-time basis, but if you feel that your child is ready to jump straight to full-time potty-training, I recommend snagging my full book to potty-training HERE, which goes over exactly how to ditch the diapers, how to tell your child is ready, and how to handle daycare, nights, travel, and more.

There’s absolutely no harm in trying to ditch diapers with a toddler in the 12-17 month range!  If things aren’t really clicking after a couple of weeks, you can do a “reset”:  Go back to part-time EC and try again in a month or two (resets are also covered in my book!).  It’s quite amazing how much your child will develop physically and cognitively in a few short weeks!

If I can potty-train completely at 18 months… Is there a point to starting EC earlier?

Absolutely!  Especially for poops.  The longer your child poops in a diaper, the more conditioned he will become to that feeling.  Some of the most common issues in potty-training toddlers stem from poops:  Poop withholding, demanding diapers to poop in, fear of pooping in the potty, etc.  All of these can be lessened or prevented by introducing the potty for poops as young as possible.

There’s also the mess.  The older your child gets, the more unpleasant those poopy diapers become.  If you’re using cloth diapers, you’ll ease your laundry burden tremendously by starting EC.  If you’re not using cloth diapers, you cut down significantly on your landfill waste by starting the potty now rather than later.

You’ll also give yourself a massive head start with potty training if you start learning your child’s timing and cues ahead of time.  Phase one of potty training involves “naked days”, where you do nothing but watch your naked child and put him on the potty when he starts to go.  Part of the naked phase is to learn your child’s natural pattern and behaviors around pee/poop so that you can better predict when they’ll happen.  If you start EC now (even part-time) you’ll go into the naked phase armed with this information ahead of time.

Young toddlers are smart and copy everything you do.  Giving him this task is an excellent way to satisfy his desire for more responsibility.  You will be amazed at what he’s capable of!

How to Start

There are two ingredients to EC:  Natural Timing and Diaper-Free Time.  Both of these ingredients will help you learn your child’s unique elimination pattern and cues.

Natural Timing

All humans have natural times that they need the bathroom; the most obvious example is first thing in the morning.  The following are some optimal times to offer the potty.  Note that your child might not need to go potty at all of these times; these are simply suggestions for you to get started.  You’ll figure out which times work for your baby very quickly!

• After Waking.  Offer the potty first thing in the morning and after every nap.
• After (or in the middle of) a Meal:  Eating can get things moving, so to speak.  All three of my kids went through periods as toddlers when they would need to poop right after we sat down for a meal!
• During Transitions Between Activities:  Try the potty after riding in the car, swing, or stroller, before a bath, during a diaper change, after watching a show, etc.  Try a few transitions and see if they work for you.
• Watch for cues:  You might already know when your kid is pooping.  She might make a poop face or have really smelly farts right before.  These are “cues”—body language or behaviors that precede or coincide with peeing or pooping.

The first step of EC is adding the potty to your routine during these key moments.  Pottytunities (a fun EC word for potty time!) offered during natural times, like waking or feeding, are what we call “prompts."

Since your child is still quite young, it’s also a good idea to use a cue noise.  A cue noise is a sound that you make every time your baby goes potty.  The purpose of the cue noise is to build a sound association for your child so that he will go when prompted by the noise.  Most parents use a sound like “pss pss” or “shh shh” for pee and/or poop, or by blowing raspberries or grunting for poop.

Diaper-Free Time

Diaper-free time is exactly what it sounds like:  You observe your naked (or bare-bottomed) child.   There are two objectives to this EC tool:

1. Observe your child to learn his body language cues. 
2. Provide opportunities to teach your child cause/effect (I started to go pee + mom put me on the potty = Pee goes in the potty) to encourage intentional cues.

Choose a time for diaper-free observation when you can dedicate your whole focus to your child for at least an hour or two.  Your only job is to watch your baby.  Do not scroll your phone, don’t fold the laundry.  Do nothing but watch your child (you can play and interact with her, of course!).

As soon as she starts to go pee or poop, transfer her immediately to the potty.  Keep the potty close so that it’s easily accessible.  Yes, you will probably leave a trail of pee or poop during the transfer, but do the transfer anyway, even if nothing makes it to the potty. 

Talk to your child about what’s happening, too.  “Oh!  You’re going pee.  Let’s go to the potty.”  Use the ASL sign if you’d like.  If there’s a mess on the floor, you can also matter-of-factly say, “Uh-oh, pee got on the floor.  Pee goes in the potty, not the floor.  Let’s clean up.”  When your child goes in the potty, you can acknowledge it (“You went pee in the potty, where it belongs”) or praise it (“Good job!  You made it to the potty!”), depending on your philosophy on praise.

The ASL sign for "toilet"

The immediate transfer to the potty is extremely important (even if nothing makes it into the potty) because that is how your child connects the potty to pee and poop.  Instead of prompting your child, like with natural timing above, this type of pottytunity teaches your child to self-initiate.  The more diaper-free opportunities you give your child to learn cause and effect, the quicker your child will connect the dots, start to hold it, and begin intentionally signaling. 

How much diaper-free time you do is up to you.  If you’ve never done any EC before, though, I recommend a minimum of a couple hours for the first day or two that you introduce the potty.  You’ll get the most bang for your buck if you do a full day (or two) of nothing but diaper-free time.  Once you’ve gotten into a good potty rhythm and are having some success, you don’t need to do any more diaper-free time (unless you want to) until it’s time to ditch diapers completely closer to 18 months.

General Tips for EC

The following are general tips for Elimination Communication.

• Model the potty for your child and be matter-of-fact about all things pee and poop.  Have an open door policy when you're using the bathroom.  If you're weird about pee and poop, your kid will be weird about pee and poop, and you don't want that.  There's nothing weird about it!  We all go pee and poop. 
• Get big siblings on board.  My kids loved going potty with their baby siblings and demonstrating how everything is done.  This also helped prevent potty regressions after the birth of a new sibling--many kids see the new baby wearing diapers and want to go back to diapers, too.  But if baby also uses the potty, big siblings are less likely to regress.
• Change your baby's diapers immediately when wet or soiled.  Remember, the goal of EC is to avoid a "diaper-trained" baby.  You want your baby to get used to feeling dry, not wet.  Changing diapers as soon as possible prevents your baby from being conditioned to the feeling of urine and poop against her skin.
• Cloth diapers are better for EC than disposable.  Disposable diapers wick moisture away too well, so baby doesn't get the immediate feedback of wetness when she goes pee.  You'll also be more likely to leave her in a wet diaper longer, because throwing out a barely-peed-in diaper feels wasteful.  Disposable diapers have also been linked to bedwetting past age 5.  Lastly, disposable diapers are buried underneath layers of clothes and pants, but if you use drop-flap diapers designed for EC like Flappy-Nappies®, the potty is always easily accessible (read more on this below).

What kind of potty do I need and how do I clean it?

Most potties are designed for toddlers aged 3-4 (that’s the average potty-training age, after all), and will be much too large for your 12-17 month old.  A list of my favorite small potties that are perfect for small toddlers can be found HERE.

You can also use a toilet seat reducer over your actual toilet for easy cleanup.  Baby Bjorn makes a great seat with a good splash guard, or you can buy a new toilet seat for your toilet with a mini seat attachment built in.  Both of those items can also be found on my list of favorite potties!

I also recommend the following items (find them on my favorite EC items list HERE):

• A foldable toilet seat reducer and/or foldable potty for outings
• Waterproof pads for diaper-free time
• Step stool for the toilet and/or the sink
• Soap dispenser that your child can use

To clean the potty:

• Pee:  Dump the pee in the toilet (or a bush, car tires, etc. on outings when a toilet is not accessible), rinse with water, and dry with a towel.  Pee is sterile, so sanitizing is not necessary.
• Poop:  Dump the poop into the toilet, rinse, clean with a disinfectant of your choice, rinse again, and dry with a towel.  If you’re out and about without access to a toilet, line the potty with a plastic bag or diaper for easy cleanup.
• Poop hack:  Put a square of toilet paper into the potty beforehand so that the poop doesn’t stick to the potty and is easier to dump.

Those are the basics!

I hope this information helps you get started with EC!  If you still have questions like...

• Should my son sit or stand to pee?
• Should I give my baby rewards?
• When will my child start self-initiating?
• What if my baby resists the potty?
• How do I potty my baby while out and about or traveling?
• How do I tackle night training?

I go much deeper into the ins and outs of newborn EC in my full book, Diapers Stink!, which covers how to start, how to navigate common challenges, how to ditch the diapers for good (and how to tell it's time), plus other important topics such as daycare, travel, bedwetting, and more.  Click below to snag your copy now!