Radical Toilet Training Chic

Because those eco-friendly green diapers just aren't good enough:

Thirteen-month-old Dominic Klatt stopped banging the furniture in the verandah, looked at his mother and clasped his right hand around his left wrist to signal that he needed to go to the bathroom.

His mother took the diaper-less tot to a tree in the yard, held him in a squatting position and made a gentle hissing sound -- prompting the infant to relieve himself on cue before he rushed back to play.

Dominic is a product of a growing "diaper-free" movement founded on the belief that babies are born with an instinctive ability to signal when they have to answer nature's call. Parents who practice the so-called "elimination communication" learn to read their children's body language to help them recognize the need, and they mimic the sounds that a child associates with the bathroom.

Erinn Klatt began toilet training her son at birth and said he has not wet his bed at night since he was six months old.

Last one to the therapist's couch is a rotten egg!

I practice elimination communication every day when I open the back door and tell the dogs to go pee. I never expected a puppy not to piddle though. Probably because unlike babies, young puppies are developmentally immature and have tiny little bladders.

The pediatric experts say these parents are full of crap, even if their babies are not:

Experts at the Child Study Center at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center say children younger than 12 months have no control over bladder or bowel movements and little control for 6 months after that.

But some parents begin going diaper-free at birth, and the infants can initiate bowel movements on cue as young as 3 to 4 months, said Elizabeth Parise, spokeswoman of DiaperFreeBaby.org, a network of free support groups promoting the practice.

And unlike some methods of toilet training, there are no rewards or punishment associated with it.

Dr. Mark Wolraich, professor of pediatrics and director of the Child Study Center, said the practice essentially conditions young children to go to the bathroom at predictable times or show clear signs when they must go.

"To be truly toilet-trained, the child has to be able to have the sensation that they need to go, be able to interpret that sensation and be able to then tell the parent and take some action," said Wolraich, who is also editor of the American Academy of Pediatrics' book on toilet training.

"And that's different from reading the subtle signs that the child is making when they have to go to the bathroom."

The practice can be problematic in public, but what's natural is beautiful:

Isis Arnesen, 33, of Boston, has a 14-week-old daughter, Lucia, who is diaper-free. She said it can be awkward to explain the process to people, such as when she helped Lucia relieve herself in a sink at a public restroom.

The hippies on communes were diaper-free as well, but they weren't so uptight about toilet training. As they say, free your bowels and the rest will follow.

UPDATE:
It used to be that the old-timey world was in black and white, as evinced from the photographic and motion picture evidence of the era. But here we have a color photo of a young woman named Nancy who's clearly a master practitioner of the ancient and extinct art of diaper-folding. Now a wizened crone, she awaits a visit from the Foxfire kids to set down in writing her arcane lore.