Unwrapping and all the steps to take off the beloved nappy is a topic that is very close to my heart.
Not only because so many mothers and fathers write to me asking me the magic formula for spannolinare.
But mostly because I am very sorry that parents have to feel so “inadequate” in dealing with this completely natural event in life.
In this case we complicate our life and make something difficult that in fact would be one of the simplest things to live.
That’s right, you read that right: taking off the diaper could be a real walk!
Why is spannolinare not a walk but a tiring and exhausting marathon?
We know very well that in many situations it is quite the opposite.
Taking the diaper off our son to go permanently to the toilet and panty becomes a real odyssey:
tantrums, fears, punishments, blackmail, scoldings, frustrations, episodes of constipation, refusals and so on and so forth.
I believe that over the years (and perhaps over the centuries) some accidents on the road that still take center stage have contributed to this problem.
For example:
- For centuries, the growth of a child has gone from being observed and accompanied to being studied, which has generated excessive theorizing of childhood
- Parents have been deprived of the right to be and to be parents by making them believe that they do not have inborn everything they need, that they cannot do without someone more experienced than them (which sometimes makes you feel incapable).
- The impossibility of living an adequate childhoodin our turn makes us adults today who are not completely autonomous.
Because of this we are a generation of often fragile adults, we have difficulty in assuming our responsibilities, we struggle to be disciplined and organized.
And we find it hard, again for this reason, to have the right dose of patience and calm, fundamental ingredients for spannolinare.
It is urgent (and not just for the spannolinare) to free ourselves from this slavery to find a balance.
And so I immediately come to the main point on which I want to emphasize, the pivot around which all future reflections will rotate.
We have to give back to these passages of life such as spannolinare the naturalness and spontaneity they deserve.
We must remember that they are not particular, special or delicate moments but are simple steps . Just as a child does not struggle to learn to drink from the glass, it also does not struggle to pee and poop in the toilet.
It is clear that over the years we have put our effort into making these moments among the most complicated ever.
We will therefore have to take a few steps back and turn back to simplicity.
But let’s do one thing at a time.
5 basic concepts from which to start for the spannolatura
The fixed points that allow us to better understand this phase in the life of all of us, which must begin to remove the initial insecurities and doubts are the following:
1️⃣ Children come naturally and gradually to control their sphincters by themselves and to recognize the sense of wanting to pee or poop and to hold it for the time necessary to get to the bathroom and then release the sphincters.
2️⃣ This is a natural , physiological fact and it happens. It happens despite us.
3️⃣ Parents are perfectly able to observe their child and recognize over time all those large and small signals that confirm his reaching autonomy
4️⃣ Parents are perfectly capable of letting themselves be imitated and children are perfectly capable (and eager) to imitate and absorb all the habits of mom and dad, including those involving peeing or pooping.
5️⃣ The sweeping and transition to this type of autonomy does not contain elements that should scare or worry us. Nor should they force us to arm ourselves to face a long period of frustration and struggles with a child who, according to many adults:
“He doesn’t want to take it out of the diaper ”, “he really doesn’t want to leave it ”, “ he’s afraid ”, “he cries if I don’t put it back ”, etc.
Yes, according to point five, this time too it seems that there is something wrong with the children, this time too they don’t want to collaborate and grow up without giving us too many headaches.
In truth, this is not the case.
All the children of the world want to grow, to let go of what is no longer needed to embrace new habits in tune with their growing body.
Children are also cooperative and certainly have no intention of stopping a natural process or causing you to have stress or pain.
If in practice we observe that this is not the case, we must not blame a “wrong” or uncooperative child. Instead, we must look at the whole outline and understand what is (or has been) there that is not working (or has not worked).
Let’s find out now the solutions you will need to guarantee you the most serene and painless sweeping possible!
Is there an ideal period or time to take the diaper off?
Maybe there is.
Usually the ideal period is indicated as the one that goes from 18 to 30 months. This period must also take into account the timing of the child, the fact that in this case the females are often earlier than the males, the initial difference between day and night, etc.
All of this is true, but what I want to do now with you is to give you some fundamental tools that leverage your instinct and the ability to observe your child.
These tools are worth more than any external information you can get from others, even if you think they know more than you do. You can use them to experience the spannolatura phase in the best way and make sure that your child is also the same.
2 basic steps to say goodbye to the diaper
If there is a right time for the child to notice and become more and more aware of the functioning of his body, if there is a right time in which he naturally feels the urge to pee and poop, he says it and does it in the bathroom , it is also true that waiting for everything to happen without our support or waiting for the siren of the fateful month of September and the entrance to the nursery school to sound can be risky.
Hazardous not so much for him as for us who risk realizing at the last minute that maybe the time has come to start removing the diaper … pure panic !!!
? “What do I do ?!” “How can I do!?”
? “Where do I start !?” “Will it be right !?”
? “Please cooperate otherwise we won’t get out !? ” ” How do I teach you ?! “
? “Why don’t you learn !? ” “You make me angry!?”
? “What if something is wrong ?!”
If we wait for the last moment, we risk getting into trouble, being caught unprepared. Or, even worse, we risk giving in to the false belief that babies have to learn and that we parents have to teach them to go without a diaper, to do it in the toilet, to warn when they run away, etc.
Nothing further from the truth.
If you want this phase of life to run smoothly like a bar of soap, it is necessary to adopt a series of large and small measures that allow you to start in time to get into the perspective of what this phase requires.
These are tricks that will allow you to restore naturalness and spontaneity to these moments without necessarily believing them to be special or difficult. They will allow you to avoid haste and breathlessness, to dose the right amount of play and above all to give power to the value of imitation and to accentuate the character of normality that this moment has the right to have.
Let us now go into the heart of our spannolimento and see together what these suggestions are. As you will see, they are primarily based on common sense and your innate ability to grasp the steps your child is taking along his or her growth path.
Step # 1: observe your child
Too often we look at our children with the air and the intention of someone who wants to control them :
“Maybe he’s about to fall!”
“Who knows if he’s going to combine one …”
“No doubt he’s getting hurt …”
“So it could break something!”
“… let’s see if he’s telling me a lie”
“Let’s see if you have lice”
“Let’s see if the allergy is returning”
We rarely dedicate ourselves to observing our children for the sheer pleasure of getting to know them.
Too little we turn to observe them with curiosity to discover with joy what they are thinking at that moment, what they are feeling, what they are trying to build, realize or discover.
Taken from habits we forget to seize that moment in which they fit a nut in a hole, in which they discover distances and depths, in which they rejoice in hugging their doll with love.
We forget that all this exists and above all we do not know that this type of observation is the answer to all our problems (even those related to removing the diaper).
Yes, because this is the way that allows you to really get to know your child on the one hand, and on the other hand not to have the usual expectations, the usual judgments, haste, superficiality as filters.
In order to reap all the best fruits of your observation you will have to pay attention to:
- Reduce your expectations: your son (or daughter) has no obligations, he is learning and he does it by imitating you, exploring, experimenting, failing and trying again.
There are no performances to complete, there are no losers or winners, there are no obligations to learn or times to respect. Observe without expecting any results.
- Reduce judgmentsas much as possible (or eliminate) : your child is never more or less good than another, is no better or worse than the ideal of a perfect child that you have in your head.
Your child is simply himself and he just wants to discover the world and discover himself, his talents and abilities.
If you judge it, it is inhibited, it devalues, it slows down. If you observe him without judgment, you are sure that everything he does is spontaneous, devoid of filters or conditioning.
- Finding balancebetween being and doing: it is not true that if you are cooking or spreading you cannot observe your child with quality.
If you take your attention away from all those routine actions you do every day, you can safely have a lot of quality looks on your child in the meantime. So get in the habit of paying your attention to him even while you’re doing something else.
You will see that if you really try, it’s very simple.
If we go back to focusing on saying goodbye to the diaper, how can we make the most of this quality observation? What are the aspects and changes that will be very useful for you to observe?
For example, you may notice from the first months of your child’s life (even from the first weeks) that:
? His call through body movements, moans, facial expressions (and crying if you don’t notice in time) is different depending on whether he is hungry, whether he feels uncomfortable in a dirty or wet diaper, whether he is hot, that he wants to be moved because something is bothering him, that he is bored, that he feels alone and lost, that something has bothered him.
? Over time he begins to realize that when he pees or poops something is happening in his body. I believe that a newborn cannot yet control his sphincters but I do not believe the story that he does not notice the stimuli and what is happening to his body. In fact, you can observe that his face becomes more red, that it gives the impression of straining, makes a face, looks more relaxed, etc.
All this will be very useful to you in the following months when the diaper can really be forgotten because it will help you not to get unprepared.
You will have had weeks and months to create a dialogue of looks useful to get to know you better and also to reassure you.
Because if you know how he tells you (even if not in words) how he experiences the moment of the evacuation, you will experience the sweating and the passage to the much more relaxed panty.
In fact, you will have observed that for your child it is not at all a foreign factor, that perhaps he really has nothing to learn and you have nothing to teach.
Simply, your dialogue can continue and it will be enough to add the awareness that now you want to move on to the next phase, the one that does not include a diaper because there is no longer a need for it.
In this last phase in particular, as we will see shortly, you will be able to observe her curiosity over time in seeing what you do while you are in the bathroom. You will notice her willingness to follow you to the bathroom and do what you do, the desire to also pick up her clothes, play with them and see how you do when you dress and undress.
These are big and small elements to observe because they make you much more aware :
1️⃣ of your child’s innate intelligence
2️⃣ of his exceptional ability to imitate you
3️⃣ of his deep desire to do as you do and give you the certainty of having always communicated (even if not in words) with your child and that nothing can interrupt this profound dialogue that will be the basis of the next steps to permanently remove the diaper.
Step 2: don’t wait for the right moment
I have dwelt on the observation (even if it may seem a completely negligible detail) because I believe that it is a fundamental step, an essential ingredient if you want to remove the diaper without much difficulty.
And it will not be enough for you to start observing your son or daughter with these eyes at the beginning of the summer that precede the maternal or when your mother and your mother-in-law look at you with the usual glances to tell you:
“But isn’t it time to take this diaper off !?”.
Yes, you have to start early and well in advance if you don’t want to go crazy afterwards.
If you believe that the right time to start spannolatura is summer or the month of June (kindergarten starts in September) …
if you believe that the right time is when he tells you or when you no longer want to change diapers, you are wrong.
7 steps to prevent difficult sweeping
Here are the steps to take (in addition to the observation cultivated since birth that we have already talked about) to avoid being caught suddenly and unprepared by the farewell to the diaper phase:
1️⃣ Do not lock yourself in the bathroom and let your child come with you and see you . I know that maybe at least in those moments you hope to be alone / or, but whoever gets off to a good start is half the battle
Letting your child participate in these moments also means that they do not fear the absence of the diaper over time.
His desire to do like you will increase.
So to experiment with the toilet, getting up and down clothes, the desire not to wear a diaper and to feel safe even without it.
2️⃣ Find ways to often leave him without a diaper , even in winter. Take advantage of the moments when you are at home together.
If he is very small and you are not yet clear about his evacuation rhythms, you can take advantage of the changeover moment to leave him free from the diaper for longer.
For example, you can avoid changing it on the changing table and prefer the bed or the carpet so as not to risk ruinous falls. In addition, you too can enjoy this moment, see him kick around, turn around and smile in freedom. In the meantime he too becomes familiar with this state of his body, he discovers it, he feels it.
3️⃣ When he grows up and by now you do not risk that as soon as he pees (or poop) he will do it again after a few seconds, leave him free without a diaper, naked or with panties or fully dressed. If it gets wet or dirty, no problem: you will wash it with love and smile together for these new diaper-free experiences.
These experiences can dot your and your baby’s life right from the start and for as long as it takes until the diaper is abandoned forever.
4️⃣ In summer you can greatly increase the moments without a diaper because it is not cold, because everything dries earlier, because you can wash it without danger of colds several times a day.
Despite this, since the year is long, I suggest you do not limit yourself and also take advantage of the colder periods , at home, to undress him from the diaper and leave him dressed in panties.
5️⃣ Do not hesitate if you are inspired to hold him and put him on the toilet and tell him that he too can do it there and you keep him, just like mom and dad do.
Play at being grown-ups like mom and dad.
If he or she is in the bathroom with you and looking at you, tell him:
” I’m done, I throw the water, I wash my hands and now you do it too ” …
So, take it, pull your pants down, unhook and pull down the diaper and:
” Come, cheers, you too like mom! … Pssssss … look at this little boy / little girl how much pee is she doing…. How does it go down…. Now let’s clean and pull the water…. Do you want to pull it? Come and I’ll let you pull it… “.
Of course, you can find all the words you think are appropriate and experience this discovery even if at that moment he will not really pee or poop.
6️⃣ The principle of weaning is also valid for the spannolinare , as for the food.
If you start in this way you can go by increasing the number of these occasions and then get to:
- intensify them between 18 months and 2 years and then continue as your child grows (he talks more and makes himself understood much better by you, he points out things that he remembers very well not only with his looks but also with his words, he is more and more autonomous both in the game and in discovering the world around him, more and more he wants to be with you, imitate you and learn to do things as you do them)
- increase more and more moments without diapers
- start taking for granted the use of the toilet with your help (and if you deem it appropriate the reducer) or the potty alone.
7️⃣ Remember that he wants to be seen imitating you , both because he feels joy and because he wants to show you what he is learning.
It doesn’t need praise or gratification.
He needs a parent who rejoices with him, who wants to watch him with the same enthusiasm that he or she is experiencing while discovering and making these new experiences their own.
So give us the care these moments deserve. Naturally, without experiencing it every time as if it were an exceptional event, but with presence and empathy .
The second mission arrives …
When the diaper during the day is now a distant memory, the next phase will begin, which is to remove the diaper at night.
