Liberal Potty Training

Chinese baby with split bottom pants (via)

Not having kids of my own has afforded me the opportunity to not think about the topic of diapers and potty training for most of my life. Then, I arrived to China. Here, whether you want to know about potty training or not, you will bear witness to it in parks, on the street and even in restaurants. I found it a little strange when I was first walking around Hangzhou and saw many parents carrying infants wearing 'slit-bottom' pants, exposing the naked bottom of the baby. My first thought was oh dear, what if the child has to go to the bathroom, what a disaster that must be. Then a little later I saw a mother suspending her approximately one year old daughter in the air over a planter and a steady stream of liquid made its way down to the dirt. In a strange way it all began to make sense, this was not an accident, this was part of the potty training process. I've seen parents pull down the pants of their young baby boy and encourage him to pee on a tree. Once I was even eating in a restaurant and the daughter of the restaurant owner walked about 15 feet away from where I was sitting and squatted and peed on the floor. No uproar, no strange looks, just business as usual. Oh and I cannot forget just yesterday when I saw a woman cleaning up something a little more graphic than pee in the middle of the sidewalk, which I can guarantee was produced by a baby, not a dog.

This of course seems strange to me, but apparently has been a method of potty training used in China and other eastern cultures for centuries. I did a little research online because I assumed there was more to it than what met the eye.What I learned was that at a young age, rather than keeping children in diapers, parents or caretakers will hold the child over a toilet, make a consistent sound that will be used each time and encourage them to release over the toilet. This practice then apparently continues when the child is out of the house as well; cue the 'slit-bottom' pants and the baby making the world its bathroom. I hear less and less families are using this method in big cities, but I sure do see a lot of babies' bottoms around these parts, so who knows!