Toilet Training a 6-Month-Old

I would’ve never imagined that a six-month-old could begin toilet training, until, on the advice of my mom, my wife and I started toilet training our baby who is was just over 5 months old at the time.  It works like this:

• Whenever you check the diaper, and it’s dry, you hold the baby over the toilet.  With any luck, he’ll go pee.
• If you check the baby’s diaper after a long nap or just any long period, it’s wet, but you suspect it’s been wet for a while, you hold him over the diaper to go pee.

Surprisingly, it was successful!  Even more surprisingly, we’ve had the following results:

• The baby has started waiting to go pee until he’s over the toilet! Not every time, of course, but about 4 times a day.
• Sometimes, he “tells” us by making a worried face, wining and waving his arms (again, this is only sometimes.)
• Two or three times now, he’s woken up to “tell” us he has to go pee; one night he started wining, so I warmed up the bottle, but he didn’t want it.  I checked his diaper, it was dry.  So took him to go pee, and he went back to sleep immediately.  All he wanted was to go pee.
• He almost always makes his bowel movements on the toilet (I’d say 90% of the time.)  He’ll “tell” us by making a scrunched up face, looking at my wife and grunting.  He always waits until we have him over the toilet.  Only once, when we were in a car and couldn’t get him to a toilet, he started crying and finally went in his diaper.

It seems that our baby at this age already understands that having a wet or dirty diaper is uncomfortable, and prefers to avoid it.  He knows how to communicate distinct needs to some extent.  I think it also helps that we praise him a lot for it; he always gets a proud smile on his face looking at us, clearly waiting for his praise.