Yep, you heard me right, I fell for the potty training B.S. But not in the way you were probably thinking…
As I write this my son is 2 years 10 months of age, and last week he became officially potty trained; waking up in the middle of the night to go potty, holding it on long car trips and the who shabang.
By no means is this a record, or am I bragging. Having a boy potty trained around three years of age is about par for the course… or so “they” say.
Which brings me to why I’m a little pissed off that I fell for the “Group Think” parenting advice that I try to fight all the time.
Because so many people have told me that boys become potty trained between two and three years of age, I never even thought to take my own advice of Always Challenge what the Group Thinks is average.
As it turns out, the research is actually pretty convincing that you can potty train children MUCH earlier than 2-3… as in new studies are coming out that show 3-6 month old infants becoming potty trained. It’s not 100% no accidents guaranteed, but the research is claiming that they are achieving a 95% no accidents success rate.
That blew me away.
And this isn’t just some claim made by a company trying to sell you a product on how to potty train children… this research is being done by the scientific research journals, so it’s relatively non biased.
If you’re interested in learning more about research based potty training techniques make sure you check out these potty training articles.
But potty training is really not the reason I decided to write this post… I wanted to write this post to remind you to stay vigilant in your fight against falling into what I call, “Group Think”. The reason group think is dangerous is because for some very un-logical reason, it is very unwise to simply follow the herd when it comes to parenting, or being successful at anything for that matter.
And almost every single time that you see a that a majority of parents doing something with their kids, it almost always makes it a bad idea.
Here are some examples:
- Public School vs. Private mentorship at developing strengths
- Making your child finish their dinner which promotes overeating and childhood obesity
- Using training wheels to teach how to ride a bike vs. Strider Bikes that had my son riding at 2 years 4 months old
- Using daycare for socializing vs. looking at how the research proves daycare makes kids LESS social
… and I could go on and on.
Stop raising your kids on just your Gut feel of how it should be done, or based off of what other children are starting to do.
Raise your children by challenging all the status quo parenting tactics… and do so by looking into the research about if the decisions you are making for your child are really good for them, because sadly most aren’t good for them at all.
Here’s to doing your parenting homework.
