Baby in sync

The Emotionally Connected Baby

by Miranda Thorpe

1 The Emotionally Connected Baby by Miranda Thorpe

2 The Emotionally Connected Baby by Miranda Thorpe

3 The Emotionally Connected Baby by Miranda Thorpe

Contents

Dedication...... 4

Acknowledgements………………………………..5

Introduction...... 6

What is Elimination Communication?...... 8

Emotional advantages of EC...... 23

Bali 2007-12...... 39

Research...... 48

Environment ...... 50

Composition of a disposable...... 56

Later toilet training...... 61

SE Asian trip 2013-14...... 66

Observations and reflections of trip...... 73

Observations of Asian societies...... 84

Conclusions...... 98

References...... 100

4 The Emotionally Connected Baby by Miranda Thorpe

Dedication

This book is dedicated to my large, beautiful, fascinating and complex family whom I love with all my heart.

My love and gratitude goes out to Mark, my husband, who has consistently loved, encouraged and supported me throughout this project without encroaching on my thunder.

Gratitude and love for all my children and grandchildren who have taught me about babies and strengthened my belief in the power of deep connection. You continue to spur my curiosity about humanity and give me hope for the future.

I encourage all those people who have this invaluable, precious parenting skill to treasure it and to continue promoting it for the betterment of humankind. For those of us who are still discovering and rediscovering it I applaud your courage and encourage you to persevere. Short-term committed dedication for long-term gain.

5 The Emotionally Connected Baby by Miranda Thorpe

Acknowledgements

My heartfelt thanks to all the adults and babies who let me interview, photograph and film them, and to the parents and grandparents who invited me into their homes and hearts for the interviews. I was so deeply touched by how generously you gave me an entry into your intimate connection with your babies. Your knowledge and experiences helped me to understand the relationship between this indispensable skill and deep emotional attachment.

6 The Emotionally Connected Baby by Miranda Thorpe

Introduction

This book is about using an indigenous method of early toilet training that strengthens the emotional and psychological bond between parent and child. This enhanced attachment has ripple effects throughout the child’s life.

This is the passionate story of how I became aware and interested in this subject of early relationship attunement. My research unveiled a fair amount about the practical aspects of this method, but nothing on the emotional significance. Frustrated and curious, I embarked on my own quest to discover more about the relational link between mothers and their babies when using traditional early potty training.

It all began in Bali. In 2007 I noticed how mothers effortlessly managed the ablutions of their really young babies without using disposable or cloth nappies (diapers).

In 2012, during a subsequent visit to Bali, I was shocked to see how rapidly things had changed in five years. There was an alarming increase in disposable nappies polluting these beautiful tropical rivers. In that moment I resolved to research this issue. Commensurately became more observant and aware of the increasingly ‘late’ potty training trends for children in Western countries New Zealand. This topic gripped me. In addition, it became more personal and urgent as my grandson was on the way.

In mid-2013 my husband and I took leave of absence from our academic and private practice lives in Auckland, New Zealand. We backpacked around South East Asia and the Indian subcontinent for seven months and seven days. During this time I spoke with many parents, and carefully observed people interacting and relating with young babies, toddlers and children. I filmed 73 interviews for my research.

Initially in this book I describe the basics of the practice of early toilet training or what we in the West call “Elimination Communication - what they in the East call “like normal…”. I focus next on the emotional and psychological advantages of this early attunement. I subsequently expand on some of the dangers of using disposables involving the baby’s health as well as the environment. In the final chapters I share my general observations, reflections and conclusions.

7 The Emotionally Connected Baby by Miranda Thorpe

The results of my research confirmed my concern that “Elimination Communication”, as used currently by four fifths of the world, is a very rapidly dying art. People do not value it. It is being replaced by our Western approaches to child rearing, that I feel increasingly leaves us and the world in a poorer, polluted and more disconnected state.

If you know about this practice of early ‘potty training’, I implore you to value and share this vital traditional process with your family and friends. If this is new to you, I encourage you to be curious and try something different. It is easier that it seems at first. It is good for the baby, for your relationship with the baby, for society and for the entire planet.

8 The Emotionally Connected Baby by Miranda Thorpe

What is “Elimination Communication”?

Elimination Communication, also called “natural baby hygiene”, is an indigenous and traditional method of ‘potty training’ a young baby that relies on a variety of subtle practices. The most important of these are minute careful observation, timing, intuition, cueing and associations. The caregiver uses their own intuition, experience and observations as well as the baby’s signals and cues to address an infant’s need to eliminate their body waste of urine

9 The Emotionally Connected Baby by Miranda Thorpe

and faeces. Most parents start within the first four months, some from the day the baby is born. Some use nappies at night in the first couple of months, others take the baby to eliminate during the night. All cultures who use this often leave the baby to be “free” whilst at home, and use a disposable for outings. Many babies can also learn sign language to indicate their needs from as young as six months. What is common to them all is the focus on the caregiver’s attunement to that particular child’s innate waste elimination patterns and rhythms, just as with feeding and sleeping. In the first few weeks the caregiver, invariably the

mother, but sometimes a sibling as in this photograph, carefully observes the pattern and habits of when the baby eliminates, and what the baby’s body indicates. The mother has to be

10 The Emotionally Connected Baby by Miranda Thorpe

totally attuned to the baby, observe his body language and habits as he lies on a mat, and begin to anticipate when he needs to ‘wee’ or to ‘poo’. If it’s cold she will keep him in leggings (dark coloured is best to see clearly when he urinates) and note when and how often he wets his leggings, she’ll change them, and start again. She will then begin to anticipate when he will be due to ‘wee’. After becoming familiar with her babies’ particular body language she will hold the new born baby’s thighs, and position him over the basin, toilet, potty or outside in the garden and wait till he urinates or defecates. In most countries the mother then uses cueing, in that she makes an onomatopoeic sound (i.e. “shshshsh”) each time the baby urinates. Some cultures use the same sound, but others use a different sound (i.e. a grunting sound) for when he defecates. I was told that the new born baby urinates about every ten minutes so there are lots of opportunities to observe, learn from, and to teach the little baby. You don’t have to wait long before the young new born baby does a ‘wee’ if you hold them over a basin. The baby then starts to associate that ‘squatting’ position and those particular sounds with his body waste elimination.

Two excellent references for learning the technique of EC. There is an optimal window of

11 The Emotionally Connected Baby by Miranda Thorpe

opportunity for mother and baby to begin their training and that is from birth to four months of age, as this is when the baby is less mobile, and is at a developmental stage of rapid absorption of information and learning. However, and this is very important, the practice of Elimination Communication and potty training can happen at any age, and it can be practiced full-time or part-time. This can be in the evenings, or just at weekends, or occasionally with a particular caregiver i.e. father, grandmother, sibling, aunt or nanny.

Indian mother with her two month old son.

12 The Emotionally Connected Baby by Miranda Thorpe

All mothers that I asked said that it was easy once you got attuned to the baby in the first couple of months, and that then it got easier and easier, but their emphasis was not on what made it easy, but what was best for the child. Everyone who practised this form of co-training was emphatic about it being healthier and more comfortable for the baby, who naturally and instinctively doesn’t want to sit or lie in its own urine or faecal matter. I think we’ve lost this concept in the West, and have stopped imagining what it must be like for a baby. So as a baby instinctively wants to feel clean, some said it was easier to use Elimination Communication

Balinese father with his five month old daughter

13 The Emotionally Connected Baby by Miranda Thorpe

right from the start. A little new born baby learns quickly by association, gets conditioned almost immediately and gets confused even with a couple of months of using nappies.

One woman I spoke with had never used a single nappy with one of her children. Interestingly she had not been raised using Elimination Communication herself, nor had she used it for her older children. She also expressed a strong, deeper bond with that particular child over the others. Ironically I couldn’t quote her, as this induced a lot of guilt, which again is not helpful. It is better to just accept....”what is is”.

Another funny related anecdote was when speaking with a middle aged man about my book, I mentioned the method of Elimination Communication. He quickly told me he knew all about it as he’d been raised in the Middle East, but he asked me please not to use the sound “shshshsh” as it would make him need to rush off to the bathroom!

On our travels we saw many siblings in charge of the younger members of the family, who instinctively just knew what to do with their younger siblings. Many babies are dressed in clothing only for the top half of their bodies when at home as it makes it easier to get them to the basin, toilet, potty, gutter or garden quickly if you are still in training.

In China split pants are very popular to enable the child to urinate or defecate easily. However, one person told me recently that she returned to a village in China after a five year interval. She was astonished to see how many disposable nappy shops had sprung up in that village in that period, and that it was increasingly difficult to find split pants for babies. In all my travels through Bali and later through South East Asia I saw that the mother or grandmother initially attended to the new born baby, and that the father, or grandfather, took a more equal and participatory role once the baby was a few months old, as shown in this photograph of a Balinese fisherman looking after his five month old baby daughter.

Fathers were particularly active and involved with their young babies in a way that I had not anticipated. I saw many fathers changing their babies’, underpants, shorts and trousers. I also witnessed a father holding his daughter over the edge of an open air lorry as it was driving – the wee was whisked away by the wind as everybody laughed as well as the little toddler. We were driving along the road, sufficiently further back along the road to not get ‘rained’ upon,

14 The Emotionally Connected Baby by Miranda Thorpe

and our driver just laughed! It wasn’t seen as disgusting or unsociable; our driver just laughed like everyone else in the truck.

In no way being disrespectful to the many dedicated fathers, grandparents, aunties and siblings that I saw caring for babies, but merely for simplicity and syntactical purposes, in this book I refer to the primary caregiver as “the mother” and as “she”, and to the baby as “he”. I have to confess that it took me a long time to get my head around just how Elimination Communication was done, and I kept catching myself being quite ignorant and unable to really understand the concept of early potty training. I just couldn’t get how simple and easy it was especially when practised from a new born stage. I kept having to recalibrate my thinking, to re-educate myself in order to integrate the idea, and gradually over the months and years I finally ‘got it’ and the understanding of its simplicity sunk in. Yes, it was basically Pavlovian association, but it was also so much more than simple behaviourism. I am sharing this confession with you Reader, so that you don’t feel alone in your initial disbelief, and lack of understanding of its simplicity.

I was intrigued, but I couldn’t really get the concept. How did it actually work in practice? It took me a long time to ‘get my head around’ how this Elimination Communication worked; initially I just didn’t understand how such a young baby could grasp this, and then gradually over the months I began to understand and realize how the process worked. I understood that the new born baby was conditioned very early and very quickly. It took me a lot longer than it does for a new born baby!

Initially I also feared that it was ‘forcing’ something on this very young child, that it was ‘unnatural training’, and I could feel my own resistances to something that was foreign and unknown. However, as I understood how simple, gentle, effective and non-intrusive it was, I relaxed and could absorb the rationale for this method.

In 2007 I first observed how effortlessly and seemingly intuitively the Balinese mothers managed the waste evacuations of their babies and toddlers. How did they do it? It seemed like a total mystery to me. I wanted to know how mothers in Eastern countries traditionally raised their children without nappies and potty trained them so young and easily, and whether there was a trend to abandon these indigenous methods. Subsequently I wondered if this traditional “Elimination Communication” method could be re-introduced in the West.

15 The Emotionally Connected Baby by Miranda Thorpe

Cloth nappies are the standard answer for many environmentally concerned parents and grandparents in the West, who also worry about the possible potential dangers of chemical contamination from a disposable nappy. However, in the East, to my surprise I found that many countries do not consider, or even know about the existence of cloth nappies. When I interviewed a young educated professional Balinese mother, she casually mentioned that she had recently seen a Japanese mother washing cloth re-usable nappies – and asked if we had those in New Zealand! She thought these new type of cloth nappies would be a good product to import into Bali for overnight use with those new borns in their first two months…

I was told that “lazy mothers” put their babies in nappies at night, but if you want to get a more effective and faster result with your new born that it was best to get up throughout the night when you sensed that your baby wanted to urinate. I was told that often the sleeping new born would cry, or wriggle with discomfort, just before wanting to urinate, that this was a communication cue, and the mother or grandmother would then take him to the basin. If you left your new born baby in nappies through the night then it would simply take the baby a bit longer to cotton on to responding on cue to the mother or caregiver’s sounds. I reflected back to my new born babies and never knew that they cried just before weeing...it may have helped me to understand better what might have been going on for that baby.

One man I spoke with in Cambodia had (fifteen years earlier) proudly made his sick wife and new born son some cloth nappies by cutting up a sarong. He hoped it would help her for the night times in the first couple of months, and told us he thought he was inventing something quite new. He didn’t know that cloth nappies already existed in other countries. If his child had been born now, I am sure he would have used disposables for that time.

Although there is an increasing modern trend towards using disposables, as evidenced by the dirty nappies in the rivers, just about all the parents that I interviewed in thirteen countries around South East Asia only use the traditional method of “Elimination Communication” at home for the first year with an occasional disposable when going out, or at night time if they chose.

Something that recurs is an assumption that you have to watch your crawling baby all that time, and that there will be constant spills and messes, and that you have to be constantly

16 The Emotionally Connected Baby by Miranda Thorpe

watchful of your active baby. “What about with carpets?! They’ll get destroyed!” Surely the wellbeing of one’s child is more important than the wellbeing of the carpet?! A colleague tried this Elimination Communication technique with her puppies, and found that by using a “shshshsh” sound, that they were trained in half the time, and with much fewer accidents! So fewer accidents on the carpet…

However, carpets being messed on, and constantly watching your baby sometimes makes people feel quite overwhelmed at the prospect. That’s usually because they’ve not understood the method. It doesn’t take into account the knowledge that you have gleaned of your baby’s pattern over the initial months. Underpants that are used for babies

17 The Emotionally Connected Baby by Miranda Thorpe

What gets lost in this picture constantly, and I’ve heard it a number of times, is that by this stage the mother knows the timing and signals of when her baby needs to go. An Indian mother told me that she knew her baby needed to defecate after a meal – that was the child’s rhythm, and she could anticipate it. This mother also told me that she can see how difficult it is for babies with either cloth or disposable nappies to roll over, crawl and start walking. Their natural developmental milestones get hindered by wearing nappies of any kind. Another disadvantage is that disposable nappies in particular bind the child’s body so that they are prevented from developing naturally and appropriately through their psychosexual stages.

Online I found some resources, ordered the excellent DVD called “Potty Whispering” that explained the method by showing footage of parents practising it. There were also quite a lot

18 The Emotionally Connected Baby by Miranda Thorpe

of Youtube clips on the internet showing the Elimination Communication practice. These were very useful as it normalised it as they were ordinary young Western parents giving it a try.

For a few months during my understanding on this matter, I had to catch myself, think through the steps and re-educate myself. So I just want to normalise it that the process can take a while. I had imagined at the start that it was messy, with babies urinating and defecating everywhere and anywhere, and yet if you do it with patience at an early age when they are not crawling, there is virtually no chance of this. The observing caregiver times the frequency of urination and defecation; with each passing month the interval of time widens between the need to go. Initially it’s every ten minutes, but by four months it’s usually every twenty minutes. With a four year old it’s about once an hour depending on what he’s had to drink of eat.

It is a supremely clean way to manage the baby, and the baby feels so much more comfortable and settled. Certainly when potty training a two year old there can be lots of accidents and ‘misses’ while he gets the hang of ‘undoing’ the conditioning that has been forced upon him during the previous couple of years.

Parents are deemed to have enough problems coping with financial difficulties and the stress of raising a baby in a nuclear family without the added pressure of having cloth nappies. The natural, cheaper and easy alternative of Elimination Communication, full time or part time, is never even suggested...

Interestingly as I investigated this topic I began to wonder about my own experience as a baby. I couldn’t ask my mother as she had died when I was 24 years old, and my father when I was 27, and my much older bothers could not remember. I then looked back through some old photographs of myself and realised that I had been potty trained well before 15 months. My mother had also taken a cine film of me on board ship at this age on our way from West Africa to the UK, and I was clearly not wearing a nappy. That was the common practice in the mid 1950s.

19 The Emotionally Connected Baby by Miranda Thorpe

Cloth nappies drying on the line

I want to emphasise that it’s vital that the attitude towards this whole issue is gentle, benign and non-rigid. It doesn’t have to be all or nothing. If you happen to pick up this book or hear about it, you can give it a try with your baby or toddler of whatever age, maybe for twenty minutes of an hour a day, or even just a couple of hours at the weekend. You might get a few more ‘misses’ or accidents than if he had been a new born, but it will still improve the chances of getting him trained earlier than if you just leave him in disposables to decide of his own accord.

A disposable nappy used for occasional outings and travelling is practical, as long as it doesn’t confuse the child too much. Towelling nappies gives the baby a much stronger sense of whether he is wet or soiled and this helps him to make associations and

20 The Emotionally Connected Baby by Miranda Thorpe

connections to his own body. Initially it is more work for the caregiver, but it is better for the child than not feeling any effects of urination or defecation, as well as better for the environment. However, if using cloth nappies they do have to be changed far more often than if you have disposable nappies that are designed to absorb moisture for several hours. On the plus side, you’ll probably train the child earlier and that will be easier, cheaper and simpler for you both.

This whole issue is to make sure that the best is being done for the baby, but also for the mother. If the mother is happy, so is her baby. It is certainly not to make the mother or caregiver feel guilty or burdened. She needs to feel supported and nurtured herself while she does that for another small, vulnerable, dependent human being.

The women that I spoke to who had not been brought up themselves with Elimination Communication felt it had been so worthwhile even though at times they felt that they were “re-inventing the wheel” and had been struggling to find support for their endeavours. However, they felt that they had done the best for their child, and that felt very satisfying.

One woman I spoke with in this category had raised her first child using Elimination Communication, but her life had suddenly become a lot more stressful when her second child was little, and so she had used disposables. She felt guilty about this as her bond with her first child was significantly stronger that she attributed to the unconscious body connection through Elimination Communication. However, you have to be realistic about what you can manage and what is practical; there are many situations that will make things difficult, such as having to return to work and having your child in day care facilities.

If you could use a nanny or a shared carer who is familiar with Elimination Communication so much the better, but this is not always possible. Sometimes mothers have taught their nannies or au pairs to use the vocalisation that the child is used to, and to know the child’s signals. Daycares often only take babies if they are still in nappies as Daycare carers are usually not trained in how to manage Elimination Communication. If you cannot do this, try and let the baby be nappy-free for a short time in the evenings, or at the weekends. This is a whole lot better than nothing and assuages the guilt.

This is a similar argument for breast feeding. Obviously “breast is best”, but if this is not possible for whatever reason, it does not help the relationship between mother and baby to

21 The Emotionally Connected Baby by Miranda Thorpe

have a guilt-ridden, worried ‘brow beating’ mother. Likewise, if it’s not possible to use Elimination Communication just think about using cloth nappies, maybe with an occasional disposable for convenience at times (maybe when mother is sick or very preoccupied), use little pants in the summer at home, in the garden or on the beach, and potty train the toddler as soon as possible, but within reason. Again I stress that this should be a guilt free, stress free, gentle and benign approach.

I can hear people saying; “But I’m a working mother” “Another thing for mothers to feel guilty about” “It’s such an effort” “I don’t have time” “I’m stretched already” “ I can’t do it without family or community support” “There’ll be such a mess” “Everybody will make fun of me or even mock me” “How can it possibly work?!” “Babies don’t understand when they are that young”. ”It’s too weird.” “I’d be called a Tree Hugger” “My family and friends would disapprove”

We assume that this early training is time consuming, and onerous because we don’t know how to do it. However, the more people start to do this, the more support groups there are, and the more help there is out there to do it, the easier it becomes. Mothers don’t have to ‘go it

22 The Emotionally Connected Baby by Miranda Thorpe

alone’, and it becomes ‘second nature’. The more commonplace it becomes, the easier it will be for the mother EC-ing her baby to do it in the public toilets or a friend’s garden. She won’t feel so abnormal or shy about it. When I asked mothers in Asia how they potty trained their babies “Like normal...” was the standard and rather dumbfounded response. It was as if Id asked them “How do you eat?” I would like us to get to that place in the West.

I was at Auckland Airport recently and heard a mother in the cubicle next to me making a “shshsh” noise. I knew instantly what was happening. I think I would never have noticed or paid any attention to this phenomenon years ago. When we emerged from the bathrooms I asked the young Chinese mother how old her baby was, and she held up seven fingers indicating seven months. She was using a sling, no nappy of any kind, and about to board a plane for a three hour journey.

While I was trying to get the hang of this concept it felt like I was holding onto quite a rigid concept; it felt like it had to be all or nothing. I imagined carrying a potty around in the supermarket, or trying to get one positioned under the baby in a car seat…all the time I had this concept of lots of misses, uncaught accidents and lots of smelly mess everywhere. I really struggled to get the idea that it’s quite the opposite – it’s called Natural Baby Hygiene after all. It’s second nature for a baby to want to feel clean, like cats. Many animals are naturally clean and eat far from where they defecate.

We understand such as behaviours as Pavlov’s dog and his responses, and in the West we often prioritise behaviourism over intuition. Elimination Communication is all about learning, behavioural patterns and associations. Using intuition and developing conscious and unconscious connections are the positive spin offs.

Go easy on yourself Reader; I was often thinking about this issue and yet it took me ages to wrap my head around the idea that actually the mother gets to know intuitively and instinctively when the baby needs to go, and that is the piece that I kept missing! The trust in the mother’s, father’s, sibling’s or grandparents’ ability to know intuitively and be in charge is so much greater in less ‘developed’ countries. Also people’s expectations of a baby’s ability to learn these basic ablutions are much higher in more traditional cultures.

23 The Emotionally Connected Baby by Miranda Thorpe

Emotional and psychological advantages of practising Elimination Communication

Elimination Communication is a dance co-created by the mother-baby dyad. Mother follows baby and baby follows mother. We know from a century of careful psychological observations of this dyad in the early months that this is a fundamentally crucial stage for developing good bonding and attachment.

The in utero experience is just as important. Scientific advances can now measure the baby’s world in the womb; this confirms so much of what we have known experientially. The baby in utero picks up a huge amount of data and emotions directly and indirectly, consciously and unconsciously, so that the mother’s world greatly influences the foetus’ world. The baby’s brain develops exponentially from conception to his third birthday in a way that is not replicated later in life. Right from the start there are vital lines of communication between baby and his environment, and between baby and his mother, that lead to his greater awareness of conscious and unconscious feelings.

Similarly, with Elimination Communication happening within the first couple of months of the new born baby’s life, there are strong conscious and unconscious emotional and relational communications that become cemented between this pair. This isn’t simply potty training. I believe that the training is a mere by-product of this process and that there is a much more important profound unconscious bond being co-created. The nappy interferes with that body to body maternal bond. It’s not to say that mother and baby can’t bond if she uses a nappy, but it is definitely some sort of interference.

The new born’s universe is centred upon sensations, and he is ultra-aware and sensitive to all of them. His sight is under developed so other senses compensate and are enhanced. He must rely on his intuition and emotional worlds to connect, just like his mother. He has no way to verbalise his feelings in words and is reliant on intuition, gestures, cries and body language – and most importantly he relies on his mother to understand, interpret and intuit. For the new born these body sensations within himself are directly linked to his emotional feelings in his body:

24 The Emotionally Connected Baby by Miranda Thorpe

“I am hungry, my stomach is churning, I want you to feed me, I am calling you, I am frustrated that nothing is happening, I am anxious that nothing is happening, I need to survive physically and emotionally. I am angry that I am not being attended to, I am furious!”

“I am hungry, I have a need to be fed, I am frustrated, I call and nobody comes, I cannot trust that my needs will be attended to, I give up calling, nobody is there for me, I cannot trust the world, the world is a dangerous place where I cannot have needs, and so I ignore and suppress my own needs.”

When the baby feels held in the mother’s thoughts and mind, this develops trust in the baby that his needs are noticed, that they exist, and for the most part that he is attended to. If the baby can tolerate not having his needs satisfied immediately it also gives him an opportunity to learn to trust that he can wait a little bit, and that his needs will still be met. There is a fine wobbly line between feeling grandiosely entitled and demanding, and teaching the baby to learn to tolerate not getting everything he wants immediately. With this delayed gratification he then develops trust in his own ability to cope and manage difficult feelings and disappointments, but delayed gratification needs to be introduced gradually, and should not be pushed too far. There is a danger that it gets over used and negatively which then becomes neglect and abuse.

So under normal circumstances the growing baby learns that his needs are mostly met by his mother and when not met by her that he can gradually learn to tolerate his feelings himself. By the time he’s a toddler the child in turn then notices his own existing needs and feelings, he develops trust in them, that they exist, that they are linked to him and therefore that he exists. The mother notices his feelings and responds appropriately, and he does the same in response to his own feelings. These observing and responsive patterns that go back and forth, leads him to be in touch with his own internal emotional life and his subjectivity. This leads to the baby having greater tolerance for affect and an improved ability to manage emotional regulation. His mother has taken his feelings seriously, he internalises that, and takes his own feelings seriously.

So from my observations I understand that the child who is brought up with early Elimination Communication has an early connection to his own body, and the consequence of this is that he has a much stronger connection to his emotional, as well as to his psychological self. My

25 The Emotionally Connected Baby by Miranda Thorpe

hypothesis is that if the mother is a good psychological ‘container’, and ‘holds’ the baby in her mind, the baby feels held in mind, and holds himself in mind.

I wondered if the mother who used Elimination Communication who by necessity had to be so finely and minutely attuned to the baby’s body cues, did this make her more generally attuned to her baby? Did it make her and the baby more attached? I suspected that this influenced the child to be more aware, sensitive and connected to his own body, to himself, and thus more connected to others. However, I had yet to feel more confident of my hypothesis by collecting data, doing research and by making my own detailed observations.

Siblings often take care of the babies in the family

26 The Emotionally Connected Baby by Miranda Thorpe

I do believe that the mother and child have a much greater opportunity for an advantageous portal to early body connection through Elimination Communication. The new born’s universe is centered on his sensations, experiences his skin and body as an extension of the self, and this forms a powerful link between his body sensations and his mother’s unconscious. Through Elimination Communication the child has a stronger connection to his complex emotional,

Laos mother with her five month old nappy-free baby used the river for her to wee

27 The Emotionally Connected Baby by Miranda Thorpe

physical and psychological self, and this in turn leads to his enhanced ability for affect regulation. With this method of early body attunement the mother follows baby, and baby follows mother, in a much more deeply connected dance of conscious and unconscious emotional, somatic and relational communication.

Does the early experience of being closely held in mind by mother in this way affect the child’s capacity for empathy and for what we call Mentalization? This latter term was coined by two psychology theorists Peter Fonagy and Anthony Bateman to denote a very important developmental capacity in a baby’s life. It doesn’t quite capture this complex process, but for these purposes suffice it to say that it is a developmental stage of being able to ‘stand in somebody else’s shoes’ and imagine somebody or something from the other’s point of view. This is linked to empathy, and is a vital ingredient for good relationships.

In no way am I saying that parents who use nappies are not loving and connected with their children. Of course parents love, and are bonded and connected – what I am saying is that I strongly believe that Elimination Communication is an enhancing, or bonus way to bond that has physical and mental health advantageous for babies as well as for the caregiver. For the parents it saves money, time and hassle, it contributes towards saving the planet, and may have somatic and personality ramifications for their child’s life.

The need for a well attuned early environment has been documented for many decades. Stern’s definition of attunement is a natural empathic responsiveness between two individuals that subtly conveys a shared emotion. Attuned adults will be able to acknowledge the infant’s current emotional state and symbolise it in a verbal and non-verbal interaction.

The importance of Mentalization cannot be underestimated. It has been at the forefront of many new initiatives in treating people with emotional and psychological difficulties, and underpins the Dialectical Behavioural Therapy programmes. A breach in the ability to Metalize is one of the indicators for mental ‘unwellness’, and suggests a disturbance in mental health.

The parent who responds with appropriate looks and gestures, as well as singing, talking, playing, babbling or ‘coo-ing’ with the baby develops attuned interactions that help the infant develop emotional regulation.(1985)

28 The Emotionally Connected Baby by Miranda Thorpe

What we may have known intuitively for millennia is now being backed up over the past few decades by extensive neuroscientific research. We now have a greater understanding of the brain’s capacity for change, generally termed neuroplasticity. There is a great deal of current scientific investigation into the activation of different brain regions, the change in brain waves, mirror neurons, neurotransmitters and modulators. Recent research reveals that the brain is a complex network rather than compartmentalised areas of this essential organ.

In addition the relatively new study of epigenetics is providing us with a clearer scientific picture of how experiences and perceptions change our brains, shape our DNA, and affect the expression of our genes intergenerationally. Epigenetics is the study of how genes get ‘tagged’ or altered by experiences in our life that can cause genes to be turned off or on.

Attunement

29 The Emotionally Connected Baby by Miranda Thorpe

Epigenetics control genes, and epigenetic changes seem to be inherited. This makes each of us unique, so even identical twins have different ‘tagging’ depending on individual events in their lives. Any experience that your parents, grandparents etc. went through before you were conceived will ‘tag’ your genetic composition. There is conclusive evidence, such as from the Dunedin Longitudinal Study, that early experiences in life alter not only our brains and personality, but those of our offspring for generations to come.

Allan Schore, another eminent research neuropsychology theorist in California emphasizes the importance of right brain connection between mother and baby right from the beginning;

“In his 2001 paper, Schore describes in detail the neurobiology of a secure attachment. He contends that attachment theory is in essence a regulatory theory and that the mechanism through which the baby’s brain develops is through the millisecond-to- millisecond reciprocal interaction. As the synchrony is established, the baby’s arousal level is regulated. Both containment and reciprocity are involved.” (Douglas, p.20)

With scientific advances we have been able to track increasingly minute and complex human interactions, and we now can establish that the mother’s emotions directly affect the baby in utero. Currently we can measure that from 23 weeks a foetus is clearly impacted by the mother’s levels of adrenaline and cortisol, and likewise feels the beneficial effects of a relaxed and safe environment. There is a great deal that we intuit without being able to measure accurately yet, and we suspect that the early twelve weeks of an embryo’s life are likewise affected.

Babies look for their mother’s feelings in their facial expressions, tiny movements around the eyes, their mother’s gaze as well as remarks and tone of voice. They watch carefully and take it all in. They also pick up a lot of unconscious feelings – their verbal and motor senses are not developed yet, and they have a stronger intuitive sense. Babies from the time they are born, and in utero, pick up much more than we have ever previously thought, and there is increasing scientific evidence for this.

The issue of psychological “containment” and “holding”, as defined by Wilfred Bion and Donald Winnicott several decades ago, is fundamentally important to parenting. This is not the physical but the psychological aspect that many parents are unaware of, or simply ignore. Parents often concentrate disproportionately on the practical issues of child rearing to the exclusion of thinking enough about the emotional and psychological. Obviously the child needs

30 The Emotionally Connected Baby by Miranda Thorpe

to be taken care of practically. Practising Elimination Communication is a way of combining both physiological and psychological aspects; by necessity one has to be practical and attend to the baby’s physical needs, but equally one has to be attuned to the unique emotional and psychological idiosyncratic needs of this particular individual. The person attending to this baby and using Elimination Communication is simply forced to combine both aspects.

The psychological needs have a huge long lifelong practical impact on this human being; we know again from the seminal Dunedin Longitudinal Study, that if the baby is not alright emotionally during his early life, then that person suffers for his entire lifetime in terms of his health. This has important practical and financial ramifications for entire communities and societies to ensure that babies, their parents and their caregivers feel emotionally supported, safe, happy and secure. It has been shown by this important study that if children are neglected and poor, and even if they just feel lonely during their early years, that they suffer physically from a health point of view during their entire lives. This result is irrespective of whether their circumstances change in adolescence or adulthood – so their physical health is forever damaged by the emotional environment of their early years.

I use this to illustrate how vitally important those first three and three quarter years of life are, and how crucial it is that we as a society get it right for this early developmental stage. If the society that we currently live in does not fully support this with suitable parental leave and government support and funding, then we still have to do our own individual part to do the best we can for our young. This may mean doing something that is counter cultural and being prepared to ‘stand up and be counted’.

In this regard, I believe that the mother practising Elimination Communication in Western countries where it is not the cultural norm, has a harder job to stay with what she believes in if she has to fight societal prejudice and ignorance. However, she has to hold onto the satisfaction of feeling that she is following her ideals with integrity, and doing the best for her child.

31 The Emotionally Connected Baby by Miranda Thorpe

I believe that the mother who has to be so finely and minutely attuned to her baby’s body cues, has a heightened relational attachment with her baby through this detailed body connection. I also contend that this in turn influences the child to be more aware, sensitive and connected to his own body, to his internal psychological as well as to his somatic world. The consequence of this heightened awareness is that he is more relational and connected to others. Of course this does not necessarily mean that this person is simply benign, loving and compassionate in their relational capacity. They can be aggressive, controlling and intrusive, but being connected and relational is the opposite of being detached, indifferent and aloof. People who are warm and passionate are more likely to be connected and relational as opposed to those who are cut off, isolated and ‘icy’. In my experience as a psychotherapist some of the worst childhood damage has been done by having a really cold and dispassionate parent. Some of the societies that I observed might be regarded as lacking in compassion or indifferent to other ethnic groups,

32 The Emotionally Connected Baby by Miranda Thorpe

cultures or religions. However, this propensity to be xenophobic, have black and white thinking and split groups into ‘good and bad’ is a human worldwide phenomenon. I wondered what they might have been like had they not had Elimination Communication as an early fundamental practice to encourage and facilitate empathy and relational connection.

So I am conscious that this mother using Elimination Communication holds her new born baby in mind in a particularly acutely attuned detailed manner that psychologically contains him. This in itself leads to reciprocity that fosters the infant’s ability to Mentalize, as well as heightens his somatic sensitivity. All the evidence shows that the early experience of being closely ‘held in mind’ by the mother positively affects the child’s capacity for empathy and Mentalization.

Peter Fonagy’s notion of Mentalization and “reflective function” is central to my argument; ”More recent research has also highlighted the importance of the maternal reflective function and the capacity of the parents to experience the baby as an ‘intentional’ being rather than simply viewing them in terms of physical characteristics or behaviour, is what helps the child to develop an understanding of mental states in other people and to regulate their own internal experiences.” (2002, p.404)

There are numerous aspects that contribute towards a good attachment. The experience in utero is fundamental. The mother’s perception of the embryo and foetus is vital. How the pregnancy develops affects the mother’s attitude towards the unborn child. The moments after birth really matter and how that experience is handled. Breast feeding is important. Touch is important. The gaze between mother and baby is important. The mother’s emotional stability and calmness really matters. All of this is a given. What I am suggesting is that this opportunity to bond with one’s new born baby is an added opportunity and advantage to both baby and to the parents.

There are various situations when this form of bonding could be really useful. I suggest that if the baby is premature, adopted, sick or has a disability Elimination Communication can be an added way of connecting. The mother might also be physically incapacitated in some way but be able to monitor her baby’s body language and she can tune into him. It is also a way for fathers to relate more emotionally and deeply with their offspring since they have not had that advantage of carrying them in their bodies for nine months.

33 The Emotionally Connected Baby by Miranda Thorpe

This method is particularly useful when it comes to bonding with premature babies, where touch has been restricted if they have had a period of time in an incubator. Adopted babies have also missed out on the body and unconscious relationship with the parent, but this is a way of deepening the bond and repairing some of what has been lost. Babies born with a disability can be daunting, but if the caregiver can feel more connected by accomplishing this aspect it also dilutes the emphasis on the disability (such as blindness) and focuses on what can be achieved. If the mother has to return to work and leave the father as the primary caregiver with the baby it is a wonderful way for him to feel more connected physically and emotionally with his child. He won’t have had that physical bond of carrying the baby, but this is a reparative method by which he can become closer.

Bali 8 months

34 The Emotionally Connected Baby by Miranda Thorpe

When the parent first sees that the child has intentionality of his own is when the baby is seen as a separate being; the parent sees that he has his own idiosyncrasies and habits that are particular to that baby, with his own intentionality around elimination of his bodily waste, and observes how he communicates this in his own unique way to the world around him. He is not simply an extension or clone of the parents. The baby has his own idiosyncratic mannerisms to indicate when and how he wants to urinate or defecate. He may feel discomfort in his body as he expresses his need ‘to go’, but however it presents he will have intentionality. Be it with a cry, a wriggle, a squirming, glazed look, a shudder, goose bumps etc. this is his body, and he is expressing his individual needs. However, he needs parental help initially so that he can

35 The Emotionally Connected Baby by Miranda Thorpe

eliminate cleanly and hygienically. Mentalization is crucial to developing a society where not only can we be connected, relational, and attuned, but in addition a society where we have the ability to stand in one another’s shoes and experience others’ pain and suffering with a view to talking about it, preventing and ending it.

So it is not enough that the caregiver simply uses Elimination Communication and pays attention to the baby’s body habits and elimination patterns. As a consequence of using Elimination Communication this caregiver then also understands that the baby is a separate being with their own individual intentionality this is the step that then fosters the mother’s and then the child’s ability to empathise and understand others. Donald Winnicott’s notion of “maternal preoccupation” and being a “good enough” mother is the foundation for good attachment, and I believe using Elimination Communication is an additional extension of this.

Winnicott also pointed out that it is the absence of what could have been that produces the “greatest scar”, and here he is referring to abandonment and neglect. (1974) We can envisage the worst cases of neglectful abuse: the baby is treated as an object, with no personality or separate sense of self. This baby is an extension of the parents, with no identity of its own. This object is neglected and abandoned, with an emotionally absent, isolated, depressed mother who is herself objectified, neglected and abandoned by society. A lonely mother with no partner, family or community support is often ‘at sea’ trying to weather the ‘storm’ all alone, and in these circumstances will often sink into post-natal depression, which is really hard for both mother and baby.

It is very distressing to watch footage of a new born baby with a depressed mother; the child is initially puzzled that the impassive, disconnected face of the mother does not mirror back his overtures, and the baby then gets increasingly distressed as he tries to engage the impassive mother. It is likewise distressing to witness this lack of interaction and to see how quickly the baby helplessly gives up and gazes around, desperately searching elsewhere for connection. This same reaction is seen when a young baby searches for a connection with a mother whose face has been immobilised by Botox. The normal responses we pick up subliminally from a myriad of facial muscles just is not possible with an impassive face.

36 The Emotionally Connected Baby by Miranda Thorpe

A similarly terrible scenario could also be that a baby is left too young, or in an unsuitable day care with rotating, transient, disconnected carers, formula-fed by a propped up bottle, neglected with no skin contact. Invariably in short staffed facilities babies are also left in disposables for hours. We have seen the epitome of this physical and emotional neglect in the films of Romanian orphanages when the plight of thousands of unwanted babies there came to light in the 1990s.

However, a baby left to his own devices for hours in the same disposable nappy also has a negligent experience. The nappy company advertises their selling point that he can evacuate continuously into the same nappy for “up to twelve hours” with no problem. He is conditioned for months and years to evacuate into an ever-dry ‘false’ nappy, belying the child’s true body state, so that he feels dry when actually he has wet himself, and in his natural state, he should actually feel wet. This is a fundamental betrayal, a breach in the basic stage of trust. This betrayed child does not connect his actions with physical consequences. He is ignorant of his own body’s natural sensations, and himself. This baby is abandoned to the ‘care’ of the nappy. My concern is that the disposable nappy increasingly becomes the maternal ‘holder’ and ‘container’, and this in turn may well affect the baby’s attachment styles, with consequential impact on future generations’ inability to relate to the body, the self, to another person and to the wider community.

If these neglected people are later able to have treatment the psychotherapist is then expected to be the ‘nappy’ that holds all the ‘crap’ that the client ‘eliminates’ and ‘dumps’. As babies and children they were conditioned to evacuate and dump messily and unhygienically for the influential first two or three years of their lives, and they continue to do this emotionally. Again they fail to learn the connection between their actions and the consequences as the disposable nappy masks this relationship.

The task for the psychotherapist or psychologist working with these people is gradually to introduce the notion of connection, relationship and consequence. “...the way in which one person can take on board the powerful feelings of another and, by communicating with touch, gesture and speech, make them more manageable.” (Bion, 1962) The therapist like Winnicott’s ‘good enough’ mother helps to process and return ‘beta elements’ into a more manageable ‘alpha’ form, and for the client becomes a ‘waste processing plant’!

37 The Emotionally Connected Baby by Miranda Thorpe

Elimination Communication is a natural phenomenon be it with piglets, monkeys or kittens. We are the only animals that have lost touch with the natural way of doing things by constraining our children for years in artificial plastic wrappings. We don’t see any other animals using nappies! Chimps are only put in nappies by humans. I believe this is our society’s need for this type of covering is also so that we keep all children’s ‘ugly’ ‘pooy-ness’ hidden, and so that we do not think of this individual as a ‘fault’ ridden, ‘messy’ human, let alone a sexual being.

Another aspect that directly links to this issue of neglect is the topic of sexuality. If the child is kept in nappies for years, this blocks genital awareness and contravenes the natural development of the early psychosexual stages. This century is the first time in our human evolution that we have bound our children in a tight plastic chemical wrap for several years at a time during a crucial phase of their sexual development. Children have around the globe been objectified, and had bound feet and stretched necks, but to my knowledge not tightly encased genitalia. Similarly the child wrapped in a disposable for increasingly longer periods of time is stunted in his normal exploration and awareness of his body and genitalia. His genitals are hidden from sight and touch to everybody else, but crucially to himself as well. The baby, toddler and nowadays the young child cannot feel, touch or become familiar with his or her own genitalia. Fundamentally this is an issue of castration.

This sorry state of affairs applies even to beaches and swimming pools. In today’s world the child is forced to wear a disposable especially designed for swimming at any public pool, and is coerced into wearing a “Swimmer” at the beach or local pool.

Therefore the only time that his genitalia are exposed is when he is having his nappy changed. He therefore associates genitalia with a parent who changes a sodden or soiled disposable nappy. Depending on the parent’s reaction, he may have years of association with some sort of facial disgust, genuinely or in jest, or expressions of exasperation and frustration at having to change yet another dirty nappy. I believe the older the child the greater the difficulty that the parent or caregiver has with cleaning up a soiled nappy. Interestingly parents currently in their thirties would have been raised with cloth nappies, and probably been potty trained by their second birthdays.

38 The Emotionally Connected Baby by Miranda Thorpe

So the current norms actually contravene the parents’ subjective experience. The child’s ‘gift’ or what he simply regards as an extension of part of himself is transformed into something that his parent inwardly or outwardly rejects and abhors – another smelly, disgusting dirty nappy. The child will feel blamed and responsible, yet it is entirely the fault of the parent who reacts like this.

39 The Emotionally Connected Baby by Miranda Thorpe

Bali – 2007 and 20012.

I first became curious about the issue of disposable nappies in April 2007, when I visited Bali for a two week holiday. I remember that day clearly in that it was a Sunday, and the locals in Seminyak, Kuta called it “Family Day”. Late in the afternoon when it was cooler, there began a swarm of motorbikes carrying a variety of family constellations down to spend time together on the beach. Sometimes there were as many as five on a motorbike. At first I noticed that the bikes that left to go home often had a little baby with no nappy, and I put it down to them having been at the beach. Then I noticed that many babies and toddlers also arrived at the beach just wearing little underpants, and when I asked where they had come from, they said that they had travelled for considerable distances without a nappy, only with pants or shorts.

Once I became aware I then began to notice babies everywhere, in the Balinese towns, markets, shops, and homes from new born upwards, who were being carried around, in people’s arms or slings, not wearing any protective padding in the form of either a cloth

Sling use is the norm

40 The Emotionally Connected Baby by Miranda Thorpe

nappy or disposable. It was a huge revelation to me. Once I started observing this phenomena I then saw these nappy-free babies everywhere, and couldn’t believe how blind I had been for all those years.

On that trip I was there for only two weeks, but I started to ask questions about what the baby customs were in Bali. It was the very first time I had even contemplated what other cultures did to manage their urinating and defecating offspring. It was something I feel embarrassed now to admit that I had never even considered. It had been one of my ‘blind spots’ in that I had clearly ‘seen’ mothers carrying around their babies only wearing little underpants, yet I had never joined the dots in my mind, and thought about an alternative to my own experience.

As I began paying attention to the practicalities of what these Balinese babies wore, I observed how naturally and easily the mothers managed their babies, and how relational the mother-baby dyad seemed in its communications. Then I noticed that fathers, grandparents, siblings and other relations were also attending to the babies’ needs, but mostly after the

41 The Emotionally Connected Baby by Miranda Thorpe

initial few months. I was struck by how much fathers interacted with their babies. They were attentive, affectionate and playful with their babies and youngsters. The entire community inevitably must feel the intergenerational ripple effect of this good early parental bond, and indeed we were impacted by the warmth and relational feel of the people.

I was struck by the overall picture of Balinese adults’ ability to relate to their young babies and children, and noticed their depth of connection with their children, with one another and with us. I started to wonder if their traditional way of being in such close body contact with their young babies, and the manner in which they trained them early had any bearing on their intense attachment and relational styles…I had so many questions.

I returned to New Zealand and started thinking about what I had discovered, and began to notice so much more about my own habitat. It had been a quarter of a century since I had potty trained my last child in 1988. I didn’t know many people with young children at that stage, but I had been in private practice for a couple of decades by this time. In my psychotherapy practice I had a few clients who were young mothers, and I started to listen carefully about this issue. I heard them referring to the ages at which they expected to potty train their children and the struggle that some of them experienced with their youngsters who were already at kindergarten. It struck me that what was now considered the appropriate age to potty train a child was a whole lot older than when I had had children.

I had given birth to and raised six babies from the mid-70s to the late 80s, and I had used a combination of muslin or terry towelling nappies, huge nappy specific safety pins, and rubber or plastic pants for about 18-22 months of each child’s life. I had used a thin disposable nappy liner that kept the baby’s skin feeling drier, and then after changing the child’s nappy I had had to slough off the faeces into the lavatory. Then I rinsed and soaked the nappies in a disinfectant solution for several hours. I would then rinse them again, and either wash them by hand which I did initially as we had no washing machine for my first two children, and then in the washing machine when we bought one. Then I would hang them out in the sun (or the rain!) to disinfect them again, bring them in when dry (or frozen solid!) and then fold them for use when they were dry. So it was quite labour intensive, and I had a good reason and incentive to want to potty train my toddlers, whom I trained around eighteen months depending on the season, the temperament and the gender of each child.

42 The Emotionally Connected Baby by Miranda Thorpe

At the time I potty trained each child it had seemed like an all-consuming issue; I read several books about it, and specifically one called “Toilet Training in less than a Day” by Azrin & Foxx, that came out in the mid-70s. I used their method of having a day with no distractions, gave the toddler lots to drink, had apron pockets filled with treats and rewards and got the children to teach their doll. This particular doll did a wee not long after they gave it a bottle of water to drink. So I did it intensively for a day or two and realised how quickly the children

43 The Emotionally Connected Baby by Miranda Thorpe

learnt, and so that over the course of about a week with a few ‘accidents’ or rather ‘learning experiences’, the child was dry during day time, and a little longer at night.

Over the course of the entire decade when I had a new born at some stage in the proceedings I had no mother, mother-in-law, aunt, cousin, sister or family member to guide or instruct me. I copied my friends and what I saw around me. I had gathered my information mostly from instinct, common sense, books and friends. However, as from the late 1980s onwards I had had an ever decreasing contact with this new born world, but now my eyes were re-opened.

By 2007 it had been about a quarter of a century since I had had much to do with little babies. Grandchildren had not started arriving yet, so there had been a hiatus in my knowledge of all things pertaining to contemporary nappies and new borns. However, at some stage in those intervening years I do remember being quite struck by disposable advertisements on the television having quite grown toddlers in nappies pretending to be adults. They were dressed with nothing on except disposable nappies, spectacles, aprons and ties, and doing all sorts of adult activities like driving cars and courting members of the opposite sex. I wasn’t sure what

44 The Emotionally Connected Baby by Miranda Thorpe

the intended subliminal message was but what I did realise was that I was watching an unfamiliar scene where children rather than babies now wore nappies.

On my return from the 2007 enlightening episode in Bali, for the first time I looked at the nappy section in my local New Zealand supermarket. There was a plethora of disposables, for every age and stage from new born right up until 15 years of age! Another blind spot – I had observed them on the shelves but had never paid attention to them before!

It reminded me of clients in therapy who have known or seen something but never been aware of it until it dawns in a ‘Eureka’ or ‘aha’ moment. Then it becomes blatantly obvious, and one cannot understand why one never saw it before.

There were nappies for different weights and stages, for day time, for night time, and for various stages of being toilet trained. I was shocked by the sheer number and different brands of disposables both for girls, and different styled ones for boys, for ages 4-7 years, and then the next category for 8-15 years. From “Walker” upwards the disposables were marketed stereotypically pink for girls, blue for boys, with superheroes and cartoon characters, nappies to look pretty, nappies to look ‘cool’. There were nappies for the child to feel dry, in contrast then there were those so the child could now feel wet, and nappies for learning to be potty trained (with an “L” like a Learner Driver’s symbol). There were nappies for all ages, even for going swimming at the beach or public pools...

I had occasionally noticed babies and children on the beaches wearing nappies which I thought quite bizarre, rather than let them crawl or run around in little swimming costumes, underpants or just being naked. I had simply assumed that that particular child must have diarrhoea. Then I had another thought. I wondered if parents were worried about the seeming increase in paedophilia, and that they suspected everyone with a cell phone camera at the beach of potentially posting their child’s photographs online. I enquired about swimming disposables and discovered that public swimming pools’ policy was standard and rigid, that they would not accept babies, toddlers and little children unless they were wearing a nappy, irrespective of whether the parent could affirm that the child was potty trained.

I also wondered about how disconnected babies, toddlers and little children would become from the anatomy of their own and others bodies if they were constantly out of sight and out of touch. If children were not allowed to explore their own bodies, did this, and how did this,

45 The Emotionally Connected Baby by Miranda Thorpe

interfere with their sexual development? It was another important slant on this increasingly troubling issue. There was a lot of money being made out of this business...There was also a very clear message that disposable nappies were not just for babies, they were now for children and even adolescents.

I decided to investigate; I wanted to know actually how mothers in Eastern countries traditionally raised their children without nappies and potty trained them so young. Indigenous people don’t even have a name for Elimination Communication - it’s just what you do without even thinking about it. It is how each parent has been raised and seen all those around them raised. I then started thinking about how could this traditional “Elimination Communication” method be re-introduced in the West? I assumed that we must have used this method a couple of hundred years ago, and then somewhere along the line it got replaced by the use of cloth nappies. However, this was never discussed or debated as a lost skill.

On a visit to a friend’s house I saw a young mother change her baby’s nappy. I had never seen this new style of disposable nappy – it was really very thin compared to the ones I had used in the mid-80s, so much so that initially I didn’t recognise it as a nappy at all! I wondered how such a thin nappy could be a suitable container only to discover that it could expand to one hundred times its size. There was a lot for me that was unknown and new, and being a naturally curious creature, I started to do some detective work.

What I also noticed as I watched this young loving mother changing her baby was her expression upon seeing the faecal matter that her child had deposited in his nappy. She quite loudly and expressively told the baby that it was “disgusting” and “terribly smelly”. I’ll never forget the expression that crossed that baby’s face in that moment – it was definitely an expression betraying confusion and slight alarm. He could not quite match the two – his mother’s horror (albeit what we might consider playfully exaggerated) and what his body had done without his control. Yet he ended up with what I perceived to be a feeling of being ‘bad’. This was a real worry, especially if this was going to be a regular occurrence in his early lifetime over several years.

The baby is exceptionally observant, and as adults we forget this. Surely this must affect the new born, baby and child who so depends on the myriad of minute facial muscles that make up gestures and expressions that contribute towards interpersonal connection? The baby so

46 The Emotionally Connected Baby by Miranda Thorpe

sensitively depends on that mirroring so that they can learn to trust that the mother’s expression matches her tone of voice and their own observations and feelings. It’s the basis of trust in others and trust in oneself. “I see that my mother’s face is worried, I feel that my mother is worried, and so the two match, and I can trust my own feelings. I feel that my mother is worried, but my mother’s face is impassive, and I am left confused and bewildered, and I cannot trust that what I see is real.”

Similarly if a baby is with a mother who is dissociated or even very preoccupied elsewhere, the baby feels unseen and unmet. If the mother or caregiver has an addiction that absorbs them and draws them literally or figuratively elsewhere, it will interfere with their ability to connect. Lately I have seen a troubling trend in that social media such as FaceBook can be very fragmenting and addictive, and I have myself felt that magnetic FaceBook pull. Many a mother is seen minding her baby, patting them with one hand and simultaneously smiling at her cell phone rather than being with her child. I have also noticed it recently even taking the place of playful family time on the beach. It is a relatively new phenomenon to see a group of several people at a restaurant table literally all of them on their cell phones. I feel intense sadness when I see a young child (the only one not on a device) witnessing this scene.

Mothers have throughout the years understandably needed the company of others, and those regular mothers’ coffee groups have been an important way to break the Western nuclear family isolation. Here the mother gets company and reality checks with contemporaries and often forms lasting friendships whilst herself going through a growthful developmental experience. The child gets to witness and learn from the mother relating to others and negotiating relationships.

However, if the mother depends predominantly and for hours on her cell phone for connection, the baby sees her relating to an object or a machine - her eyes light up at a post, or a YouTube clip, rather than with her baby. It’s not all that different than if she were reading to herself, but then the baby is less likely to witness that and it might not be as often in front of the child. Also then the infant sees her mother reading a book, rather than role modelling a screen. Also if the mother is preoccupied constantly by a screen or her cell phone the child is more likely to ‘play up’ to get her attention. I well remember how often my small children would react by demanding attention (wanting juice, or something out of reach, or to go to the bathroom) whenever I was talking to a friend on the phone. They were reminding me of their

47 The Emotionally Connected Baby by Miranda Thorpe

importance, and I was trying to balance it with my friendship needs. I had to let them know gently, and at a time they could absorb it, that I too had a life that was separate to theirs. This is a blow to the child’s narcissistic entitlement, but a necessary one so that he learns that the world does not revolve exclusively around them. I was left with many questions and wonderings about this supposed ‘Brave New World’ and the more curious I became the more compelled I was to investigate this whole new nappy related environment surrounding the new mother and infant dyad.

48 The Emotionally Connected Baby by Miranda Thorpe

Research

I began trawling through the internet to find out more about what was going on in our western world for this 21st Century Millennial baby. After quite a varied search, I gathered that there was a ‘nappy battle’ going on. There were the advocates for cloth nappies and those that recommended disposables, with several forum discussion groups about the environmental ‘pros and cons’ of both. There were some groups promoting the use of re-usable cloth nappies for environmental reasons, with ensuing debates about energy use and sustainability. There was an emphasis on using organic cotton, which was quite an expensive investment for a new couple with a first baby.

During the course of my enquiry I stumbled upon an important group that had been trying to reintroduce Elimination Communication into western society. In the United States of America there were three women of note; Laurie Boucke, Linda Penn and Ingrid Bauer had become aware of, and were influenced and inspired by time spent in countries where Elimination Communication was the cultural norm. They carried on to write about it for the West. Christine Gross-Loh, who wrote The Diaper-Free Baby, writes; “Bauer refers to infant pottying as “Natural Infant Hygiene” and also coined the term elimination communication. Boucke, who has written several books, including “Infant Potty Training” and is co-authoring several forthcoming medical studies on EC, says” For years, I’ve emphasised that it’s really important for parents to be presented with more than one option so they can make an informed decision about whether to use diapers exclusively or to learn to recognize baby’s elimination signals and assist her in using the potty or toilet”. I totally agree with this stance in that the right to be informed and to choose is so fundamentally important.

Soon after this I heard an interview on the radio about a handful of mothers in a support group who were using Elimination Communication in Nelson, a small New Zealand town in the South Island. This encouraged me to continue with my exploration of this topic.

Ironically when I published my findings a few years later in a psychotherapy journal I received a lovely letter from the spokesperson of that group. She had read my article and thanked me for my emphasis on the psychological reflections on it. She said that in this rather isolated endeavour, the particular attention I had paid to the emotional aspect had really encouraged her to continue with her early potty training of her second child. I received another grateful letter from a young mother who had almost given up with her five month old

49 The Emotionally Connected Baby by Miranda Thorpe

son. She had been feeling isolated with trying this method, and had been doing it somewhat “half-heartedly”. However, my article on the psychological angle had encouraged her to value Elimination Communication as a bonding experience and once she felt re-encouraged it all happened easily and quickly. I believe she gained confidence and that the baby picked up on this unconsciously. So I had given these two women hope and encouragement, and they in turn gave me the same. This then encouraged me to persevere.

I felt quite alone in this responsibility, and realised that I felt the pressure to pursue this by writing about it and bringing it to light. Once something has surfaced to awareness one can no longer become unaware, and the clock was ticking about the loss of what I saw as this essential skill. More and more babies would be affected by people abandoning this parenting technique and they were unaware of what they were giving up. It felt I had a duty to shine a light on this blindness to give parents an informed option.

It was a difficult endeavour to do research on a topic that has virtually no coverage or resources. I looked hard, but I found nothing at all on the emotional and psychological aspect of a practical technique that most of the world takes so for granted, and is such ‘a given’ that it doesn’t even have a name! Even “eating” and “breathing” has more written about it than early potty training.

However, there was a fair amount written about the hazards to our global environment of using nappies, and the quantities were truly shocking. Very often in presentations I would start with the environmental statistics as they impacted on the audience quite dramatically. However, so often we couldn’t get past this shocking realisation and move onto the subtly of the depth of emotional connection that Elimination Communication offered. Sometimes people felt if we transitioned to cloth nappies that it was enough, and yet they had not grasped the importance of that relational body awareness between mother and baby when they are involved with new born elimination observation. This was the aspect that I had to keep emphasising as crucial, so that the potentially catastrophic environmental issues didn’t overtake.

50 The Emotionally Connected Baby by Miranda Thorpe

Environment

So returning to my story of how I became interested in this issue, I had noticed in Bali how mothers did not use any form of nappy. Five years later in 2012 we had another holiday there. In that short time, to my absolute horror, there were so many being used on such a daily regular basis that disposable nappies were dramatically accumulating in large plastic bags along all the rivers beds. Balinese people traditionally and typically burn their bamboo, leafy biodegradable rubbish every day, and are unused to using articles that cannot be burnt.

If they can’t be burnt they simply don’t know what to do with the soiled disposable nappies. So they put them into plastic bags and throw them into a dump or in the rivers, imagining that they will decompose.

51 The Emotionally Connected Baby by Miranda Thorpe

It was a tragedy how this exquisite island, with its once pristine rivers, was being so badly polluted by plastic bags, plastic bottles and plastic disposable nappies. What had happened in such a short time?! This was the urgent prompt that lead me to enquire further into this potential disaster.

There was certainly a fair amount on the internet about the environmental dangers to our planet of using the current type of disposable nappy. There is a growing global environmental problem of millions of disposable nappies being used every single day. For example, it was calculated that on our planet on the 25th January 2012, there were 342 million disposables nappies used on that day alone. Yet on that date the worldwide use of disposables was only

52 The Emotionally Connected Baby by Miranda Thorpe

21%, with only 8.5% of countries with over 90% “penetration”. According to The Disposable Diaper Industry Source this meant that the market for disposables in 2012 was virtually

saturated in USA and New Zealand, and that the companies would require very little advertising to keep people buying disposables. These populations were now ‘hooked’ and dependent. However, China’s figures showed that only 16% and in India only 2% of their population used disposables. The report was highlighting potential markets for disposable nappies and stated that one third of the globe do not use them due to “poverty”…yet both India and China are growing into wealthy economies where this explanation doesn’t quite hold true…There was no discussion in the report that parents might chose not to use disposables, and that it may not be due to poverty, but rather that it was the inherited cultural norm. Through this process of enquiry I was staggered to discover that what I had blindly taken for granted was practiced in only a fifth of the world, and that I had a lot to learn about other global cultures.

53 The Emotionally Connected Baby by Miranda Thorpe

I gleaned a lot of statistical knowledge from the internet. In the United States of America the average use of disposables for one child potty trained at two and a half years is 10,000 disposable nappies. In 2013, during that one year, and in the USA alone, 27.4 billion disposables were used. Put in visual terms this would mean a path of nappies that would stretch to the moon and back nine times…every single year.

Disposables are often thrown in the river

It is estimated that a disposable nappy takes at least 550 – 600 years to decompose in a landfill. Disposables are the third largest consumer item in landfills. Five million tonnes of untreated human waste is put into the landfills annually, contaminating the ground water and potentially spreading disease. For this reason the American Public Health corporation, together with their Paediatrics Society, are urging parents to slough off and dispose of any faecal matter into the toilet first…I have never seen any parent do this with a disposable, yet

54 The Emotionally Connected Baby by Miranda Thorpe

parents do this regularly with cloth nappies. What will happen if China and India with their burgeoning populations follow the Western model and start to depend almost entirely on disposables and later toilet training?

With well over one million non-biodegradable disposable nappies being used in New Zealand every single day, the physical dangers to our own environment are obvious, yet this issue silently creeps under the radar and goes unattended.

One million disposables in NZ every day

So my preliminary enquiries had revealed a stark fragmentation. There were a few sites focused on the ecological ‘war’ between the use of cloth and disposables, a few sites on the potential health dangers of using disposables and a couple describing the indigenous technique of “Elimination Communication” and early toilet training. These internet references and books focussed on promoting the concept, the practical aspects of early potty training,

55 The Emotionally Connected Baby by Miranda Thorpe

and encouraging people not to be daunted by the unknown in that it could be easier than anticipated. Together with the “Potty Whispering” DVD that taught the technique by giving many practical examples, these were excellent resources. However, what dawned on me was that I believed people would embrace a new challenging practice much more readily if they understood how it was so much better for their baby at a psychological and emotional level, rather than it simply being quicker and cheaper, and better environmentally for the planet. Of course if it is better for the planet, it is better for the next generation, for posterity, and thus for one’s children, however, one needs more convincing of the direct value to the child for a greater incentive to learn a new skill.

I could find no central site, book or person, integrating and synthesizing all these disparate environmental, technical, medical, practical and psychological issues. However, what I found most striking was the absence of the psychological, attachment, emotional and relational aspects of this very important developmental, cultural, social and humanitarian issue. This attention to the bonding and attachment between mother and baby that ensues as a result of this Elimination Communication practice to me was the most vitally important missing link in the entire picture. However, it was also the most neglected aspect, or even entirely absent, in all the literature that I read. Again I felt this was the missing link: the emphasis in these Western resources was on the practical aspects of preparing for a new baby instead of on the emotional. I was spurred on to spread the word about this vital conscious and unconscious facet that I believe needed to be highlighted so that this parenting skill was not going to be lost forever. We in more industrialised, ‘developed’ countries had a lot to learn from more traditionally based cultures in order to enhance our relationships with our children.

56 The Emotionally Connected Baby by Miranda Thorpe

Composition of a disposable nappy

Through my investigations I came across the chemical components of disposable nappies, and was quite shocked to discover the contents that comprise the modern thin 21st century nappy. There was a list of one petroleum based chemical after the next. However, common to all types of disposable is a polyacrylic acid core composed of many small beads that swell to 100 times their weight, and consequently are able to hold a great deal of urine and faecal moisture over the course of a few hours. One nappy company advertising its advantageous selling point claims that it allows the baby to feel “dry for up to 12 hours”. It dawned on me that this baby then doesn’t actually feel the consequences of his own bodily functions of urinating, or

57 The Emotionally Connected Baby by Miranda Thorpe

‘wetting’ himself, because he is not actually wetting himself…The baby feels dry even after wetting, so what sort of message does that give to this young human child who is learning at such a rapid rate in those first few weeks?

A baby’s skin is also very delicate, sensitive and thin; these are early days and we still do not know what chemicals do, and do not, get absorbed through that fine membrane. To my knowledge no scientific studies have been done on this. Disposables are almost entirely made up of polyacrylic acid beads, polyacrylate, polypropylene, polyester, polyethylene, synthetic rubber, latex, and wood cellulose fiber. Disposables as we know them now, with the polyacrylic gel core composition, are relatively recent, so studies on their potential effects are still embryonic but concerns are growing.

58 The Emotionally Connected Baby by Miranda Thorpe

Polyacrylic acid was added to tampons in the 1980s, and within a short time was banned after it caused fatal Toxic Shock Syndrome. Very few studies have been done in the self-regulated disposable nappy industry, but some scientific and anecdotal evidences are emerging that suggest babies who have been exposed to disposables may have a greater propensity for asthma, bronchial and immunity problems. There are various internet sources about potential dangers of these chemicals, and a few that referred to polyacrylic acid being lethal for some small mammals when inhaled. Yet we use them on our small human mammals. I am not a chemist and I have to default to what I read, but the more I find articles on reputable scientific sites the more shocked and alarmed I become.

The internet can be a wonderful source of information, however it’s important to try and be discerning and sift through what is alarmist and what is trustworthy. I have been careful to reference more scientific articles and sources. Worries about health issues related to disposable nappies keep trickling in. I read that one report showed that rashes rose from 7.1% to 61% with the use of disposables. Then there was an article in 2007 in the prestigious British medical journal “The Lancet” warning of the potential dangers of hip dysplasia in babies who use disposable nappies.

Another concern, raised from a German study at Kiel University in 2000, was that male babies’ testes are subjected to hotter temperatures if they use disposables. Irrespective of weather conditions, the study warns that this affects male children’s reproductive organs, as well as potentially causing carcinogenic problems. A change in one degree is enough to cause alarm. I was told by some interviewees that doctors in South East Asia often advise mothers to avoid using disposables for any length of time in the tropics in the heat of the day. They were told it was alright to use a disposable for an hour or so when the child is sick.

So I found a fair amount had already been written about the potential dangers of using disposable nappies that threatened the health of the baby, as well as the health of the planet. So if this was the case why would parents subject their children, as well as their environment, to these potential dangers? I understood that often people felt discouraged and demoralized by the enormity of trying to “save the planet” and shrug their shoulders in despair. Sometimes people simply feel lazy and do not care. Perhaps it was a case of being ignorant, (like I had been) as we often use denial to try and ease our conscience. People sometimes use “Eco

59 The Emotionally Connected Baby by Miranda Thorpe

friendly” disposables that are an improvement on the standard ones. However a great percentage of this nappy will still be composed of non-biodegradable materials such as latex. One of my concerns is that a new type of disposable will be invented that is totally biodegradable, and although this would mitigate the environmental issue, it would deny parents the opportunity of using Elimination Communication and enhancing their relationships with their babies.

Sometimes people feel the issue is so huge and beyond their control that they can only cope with their immediate environment, and that the problems of daily life are difficult and stressful enough without bothering about trying a new way of potty training your baby. However, I have observed that generally parents always want the best for their children in every regard, and rightly or wrongly parents often do things out of a belief that they are helping their children, or improving things for them. I don’t believe parents would subject their children to physical and health risks if they knew about the potential toxicity of disposables. A tired, stressed and pressured parent will take an easy option with regard to protecting the planet, but not usually if they know it would endanger the health of their baby.

However, another fundamental issue is the emotional and psychological health of the baby. We now have confirmation from various salient studies, such as the Dunedin Study in New Zealand. This seminal longitudinal study has provided the scientific world with a substantial amount of proven evidence that the first three years of life are paramount. If the baby is in a good emotional place, well attuned and bonded with the parents, the chances are much better for that person to have good physical health throughout the rest of their lives. Early good emotional health has a knock on effect for good physical and psychological health for their lifetime.

Equally if the baby is neglected, not well connected, and has a bad start in life, their physical and psychological health is compromised throughout their entire lifetime irrespective of whether their circumstances improve. Therefore good nurturing and attachment is vital imprinting during the first years of life for a good long term prognosis.

I strongly believe that the practice of Elimination Communication is an easy method of enhancing this early good start in life. I know that parents who use nappies can have good

60 The Emotionally Connected Baby by Miranda Thorpe

bonding and attachment with their children, that they can be loving and caring and that the children will grow up well adjusted and balanced. In no way am I suggesting that children who are raised with nappies are neglected and unloved. What I am proposing is that this practice provides an easy way to ensure attunement at all sorts of levels, and is an extra portal to enhanced conscious and unconscious communication between caregiver and baby. It also provides a means for the baby to be more in touch with his own body and to have gentle cause and effect body experiences.

People in countries where this has been the cultural norm are changing their ways to adapt to a westernized model of baby care, and abandoning what the youngsters call “provincial” or “old fashioned” skills without realizing what they are relinquishing in the process. If they knew these skills were precious to their baby and to that baby’s future maybe they would appreciate the old ways more. However, if there is nothing to be valued, there is nothing to fight for. I am hoping that this book will shine a light on this issue, and help some adults to treasure their old ways and to decide on what is important.

61 The Emotionally Connected Baby by Miranda Thorpe

Later Toilet training

To my knowledge there has never been such a phenomenon in our human history as this issue of significantly delayed toilet training, and I wanted to look at the impact and ramifications. I was also rather bewildered about the direction and speed at which things appeared to be moving. My concern about the emotional aspect was that these disposable nappies were increasingly acting as the artificially prolonged pseudo psychic ‘holder’ and ‘container’. I started reflecting on how this affected attachment styles, and whether this would impact on future generations’ ability, or rather inability, to relate to one’s own body as well as to another person.

Rarely do I hear about the dangers of delayed or late toilet training, yet studies reveal that this is the case. Children raised in Western countries seem to be getting toilet trained later and

62 The Emotionally Connected Baby by Miranda Thorpe

later, so that they are no longer babies, or toddlers, but rather kindergarten and school-aged children.

There has been a recent British Broadcasting Corporation news report in the United Kingdom discussing teachers’ concerns at the increasing number of four and five year old children arriving at school wearing disposable nappies. I wondered about the aetiology of these children’s disconnection from their own bodies, and noticed that ordinary New Zealand supermarkets stocked several shelves of disposable nappies catering for children and adolescents as old as 15 years of age.

I think it is important that children of any age should be made to feel confident and not to

63 The Emotionally Connected Baby by Miranda Thorpe

experience shame related to enuresis. This is sometimes a psychological problem, often related to anxiety, and occasionally to issues of abuse. It is important that there is practical help for these children in the form of disposable nappies as they work through their psychological problems with professional help. However, if the bedwetting is simply related to delayed toilet training, then this is detrimental to the child’s self-esteem and development. I have wondered if it could be that some parents do not like the idea of their children growing up, especially if they have only one or two children, and this is a way to hold onto them as babies for longer.

Recent studies suggest that the more you delay the toilet training the higher the risk that they child will develop serious bladder infections, constipation, enuresis and delayed sphincter control. I had observed mothers referring to waiting and allowing their children to suggest at what age and stage they were ready to use the toilet. I gleaned that the mothers expected that the longer they left it the easier the toilet training would be, that it would be an overnight phenomena, that the child would understand intellectually what was required of him or her, and execute it easily. However, they had not taken into account body memory, and conditioning. These children had been trained for years to evacuate in a particular way, at a stage in life when they were very impressionable, and this was not easily undone.

In an interview on the Potty Whispering DVD, summarising an important recent medical study from the University of Verona, Dr Rugolotto concluded;

“Stool toileting refusal (constipation) is 20% if you start (potty training) around 24 months. If you start between three and a half years and four years you have 50% risk. If you start around four years, the risk is about 73%” (Rugolotto)

So the later you start to toilet train the child the greater the chances of ongoing constipation and bed wetting problems. Researchers found that the incontinent children who could not control their bladders were more likely to have begun potty training after 30 months…hence the demand for disposables for adolescent children as children. Clearly children were being toilet trained later and later…the longer they had been conditioned to use a disposable, naturally the longer it took them to undo that conditioning. Again I’m not referring here to when the older child has either a psychological or medical condition that requires them to use a disposable.

64 The Emotionally Connected Baby by Miranda Thorpe

I have also not referred to the enormous problem of the elderly using disposables, and that we are going to have a proportionally greater increase in elderly people as time goes on. However to counterbalance this dependence, there are natural ways to improve bladder control such as doing Pilates and Thai Chi exercises that improve the pelvic floor. It is better that these should be offered or encouraged with the elderly. Disposable nappies should not be the automatic choice – the natural alternative should be the first option.

The question whether early potty training causes physical and/or emotional problems, the answer from all the research is decidedly that it does not. However, coercive potty training at any age does. It is of the utmost importance that the attitude towards the child’s elimination is benign and accepting, at any age.

It is interesting to note that the founder of psychology Sigmund Freud talked about this over a century ago, he was concerned about any approach to toilet training that might be regarded as extreme – too early, too late, too strict, too “libidinous” (Fenichel 1945, p.305) Often

65 The Emotionally Connected Baby by Miranda Thorpe

misquoted, it is important to note that Freud did not link early toilet training to personality disorders. (Fisher & Greenberg 1977; Masling, 1999)

At the time that Freud was publishing his theories there was a trend to toilet train the baby in a harsh manner. So it seems that the coercive and punitive child ‘discipline’ of the 1920s and 1930s was conflated with early potty training, and Freud warned about being too strict and extreme when potty training babies.

4 – 7

Subsequently in a more liberal post World War II atmosphere the medical reformers reactively swung in the opposite direction by advocating a much later potty training practice. A couple of influential theorists and books were written that advocated training for toddlers. Theorists and books took hold, and the practice then became fixed at a two year old age.

The few subsequent studies done on gentle early potty training have reported no behavioural problems or negative side effects, but the emphasis is on the manner in which it is done, rather than the timing. (Ball,1971; Smeets et al,1985). In addition medical studies confirm that early training helps with urinary tract infections (Jason et al 2000; Sillen & Hanson, 2000) and some research actually recommends it. (Hellstrom & Sillen, 2001)

66 The Emotionally Connected Baby by Miranda Thorpe

Big seven month South East Asian trip – 2013-2014.

The route of our seven month and seven day trip.

I return to the story of my own metaphorical and literal journey with this topic. My husband and I both had a six month leave of absence coming up in 2013, and because it was over the Christmas period it turned into just over seven months. In the years prior we had many a long discussion as to how best to utilise a valuable, possibly unique and irreplaceable, chunk of time like this. Should we donate our time and energy to helping the underprivileged by going to volunteer in a school, build a hospital, or a village water well? Or should we try and write a book and live on a deserted remote tropical island? Should we immerse ourselves in one culture, or get to know several briefly? For months we felt inspired by thoughts of these noble endeavours, but each time we imagined the details and thought it through more thoroughly we felt demotivated, de-energised, and stagnant. I remember my husband saying how he loved

67 The Emotionally Connected Baby by Miranda Thorpe

the idea of building a school, but the daily actuality of it in searing tropical heat would probably be quite different!

As we reflected upon our lives we realised that we already donated so much of our energy and effort to others with the attention we paid to our family, clients, friends, colleagues, students and wider causes. By this stage we had eight adult children, two grandchildren, demanding student and client work, writing papers for conferences, seminars, books and journals, as well as volunteering a lot of our time to managing and teaching in psychology and psychotherapy organisations. So we justified it to ourselves that, now in our mid 50s and only a decade into our relationship, we needed a long backpacking holiday, a second honeymoon, and that this was really the time for us to take a break.

We had chosen the university scheme to have a seven month break rather than bank the money and continue working. We had been saving for several years using some of our income from my practice and during Mark’s position as Head of Psychology Department at Auckland University of Technology in Auckland. I had prepared my clients in my psychotherapy private practice well ahead of time that I would be returning after taking a seven month leave of absence. A few clients chose to go with a recommended locum, some I Skyped, some chose to end their therapy, and some chose to take a break and said they would re-engage in their therapy when I returned. Many psychotherapists thought I was being very brave or foolish, and that maybe I was jeopardising my successful practice. However, I found that on my return I picked up where I had left off with almost all my clients, and that the break had had little damaging effect on my work or my patients. This experience also gave me an example, and accurate confirmation, of the power of being a good psychological ‘container’. The notion of having ‘held’ my clients in my mind over the break was akin to the importance of the mother holding her baby in mind.

During the course of our planning we decided that if we took off the second half of the year it would mean that my husband avoided the intense marking pressure of the second semester. However, it would mean that we missed out on more income as the second half of the year is always busier in private practice than the first. We also had to think of what time of the year we would prefer to avoid living in New Zealand – and so with little ambivalence we decided that if we left from mid-June onwards we could miss our cold wet winter. No more doubt.

68 The Emotionally Connected Baby by Miranda Thorpe

We managed to let our little house for the seven months so that covered our mortgage repayments. Though we let our house furnished, we packed up all our personal belongings and put them in storage. However, with my loss of income and my husband’s small pay out from the university, it gave us a very limited amount upon which to live. We calculated that we would not manage to live on our budget in Europe, North America, or southern Africa, which had all been options, and so we finally made a decision to travel where it would be cheapest to live i.e. South East Asia. We also wanted to get to know our neighbouring countries better. I was set on Cambodia and the Maldives, my husband was set on India and Vietnam, so we decided to do both. We found an international psychotherapy conference that we could attend in August in Kuching, Borneo so that was another pivotal anchor around which we organised our trip, and both Mark and I had papers accepted for it.

Lots of aspects were fitting into place. However, we were concerned that Mark in particular would struggle with the heat and humidity, but as we looked at the map it all seemed to synchronise quite neatly in that the time of the year that we were planning to go would be the coolest. We studied the climate patterns carefully and decided that this had to be our main guide and compass. We packed our backpacks, budgeted for $50 for the two of us per day, and got a vague outline of our route.

However, I wanted a worthwhile project as we travelled, and I decided to pursue my investigations into this toilet training discrepancy between the West and East, and into indigenous child rearing practices. Could we learn to revert to the ‘old ways’ to help the planet, as well as the health of our off spring with the additional bonus of an improved psychological attachment? These were my preliminary musings, and I wanted to do the equivalent of a seven month ‘Baby Observation’ to check out if my thoughts and theories could be verified.

We decided to spend the first two months of our trip in Bali, where we knew we loved the culture and where we felt relatively familiar. This time we intended to explore the island further, and get to new places. During our holiday the previous year in 2012 I had been shocked at the increase in disposable use. So in view of how quickly things seemed to be changing in Bali, I made a decision to investigate this whole topic of a nappy-less society by documenting interviews with parents, grandparents and all sorts of family members across the generations to get a good cross section.

69 The Emotionally Connected Baby by Miranda Thorpe

I also wanted to show my 25 year old, slightly sceptical, daughter how things could be done without using disposables. I wanted to show her evidence by filming interviews and observing families who used Elimination Communication. My daughter-in-law gave birth to a beautiful healthy baby boy called Jules, and luckily we were around for the first nine weeks of his life after his birth.

When we had made our initial plans my daughter-in-law had been pregnant, but unfortunately she miscarried, and by then our travels had been booked and our leave from work already organised with the university and with my clients. So when she got pregnant for the second time, it meant that we were around only for the first couple of months after the baby’s birth, which was a pity for us and for them. However, we had to depart and vowed to be in as much contact as we could through internet connection.

With my husband’s support, whose hobby is photography, I have used a lot of his photographs for this publication. I also did a lot of research into the technology of filming, and finally I bought a small good quality High Definition video camera and tripod. In addition I purchased a microphone for parent interviews with a view to possibly making a documentary if the material turned out to be suitable. I planned to use a combination of photographs, videos, interviews and local music.

So the outcome was that I documented my observations throughout our travels. I did more than 70 interviews over a seven months and seven day expedition throughout the13 countries in South East Asia and the Indian subcontinent.

Quite soon into my interviews I started to become very excited and aware of the huge potential of this unconscious communication between a new born and the caregiver or mother. I noticed the strong bond that it fostered and saw so much evidence of this attunement and bond being translated into strongly connected relationships throughout the lifespan. All my initial interviews, at the start of our big trip, were done in Bali and Lombok where we spent almost two months before continuing on to the conference in Malaysia. I used this material for my initial paper and presentation at the conference.

70 The Emotionally Connected Baby by Miranda Thorpe

In Bali on ‘baby alert’.

My first paper on this subject was at the “Asia Pacific Rim International Counselling and Psychotherapy Conference” in August 2013 in Kuching, Sarawak, Malaysia. My talk was greeted with an enthusiastic response from delegates with many inviting me to come and give it at their universities and institutions. Many colleagues in the audience were totally familiar with this technique and unaware that we were not! After my presentation they wanted to bring global awareness to the value of this child rearing tradition, and felt proud to have been raised using Elimination Communication. I certainly received a great deal of encouragement that I

71 The Emotionally Connected Baby by Miranda Thorpe

was on the right track, and that I needed to continue collecting interviews, photographs and film footage, as well as my reflections on this topic.

By this stage I had formulated my own theory, and delivered workshops and conference papers about the link between one’s original attachment style and the way that one manages or does not manage any immigration or emigration process. The early attachment styles such as secure, avoidant, ambivalent or disorganised set the template for so much to come.

72 The Emotionally Connected Baby by Miranda Thorpe

Being an experienced psychotherapist I knew that early new born bonding and attachment styles influence the rest of one’s relationships, be they friendship, sexual or work relationships throughout the course of one’s life. Consequently this lead me to contemplate on the lifelong ripple effects due to an early relational imprinting of an early body, or somatic, attunement.

73 The Emotionally Connected Baby by Miranda Thorpe

My observations and reflections from our seven month Asian trip

As we travelled I attempted to set aside my psychotherapy self so that I could have a much needed break from a couple of decades of working intensively and without pause in private practice and in not-for-profit agencies. However, once a psychotherapist, always a psychotherapist and it’s hard to shake that lens through which one perceives the world.

Anecdotal evidence gleaned along the way from conversations with interviewees in New Zealand and overseas off the record confirmed that the mother had a stronger bond with the baby with whom they had practiced Elimination Communication. There were a few mothers who for various reasons had been able to use Elimination Communication with one of their babies as opposed to another. They did not want to be cited for obvious reasons, but were adamant that they had a much stronger conscious and unconscious emotional, somatic and psychological connection with the child with whom they had practiced Elimination Communication. This bond continued well into adulthood. This felt like the greatest proof I could have heard, and yet ironically I couldn’t quote them. However, it encouraged me to continue with my theory.

74 The Emotionally Connected Baby by Miranda Thorpe

As we travelled I began to get a sense for when a place was suitable to look for subjects to be interviewed. Sometimes we stayed with a family which was perfect. However, it would usually take me a day or two to settle into the new environment, to ascertain whether there was a family connected to where we were staying, and if there were appropriate parents or grandparents that I could subsequently interview. I needed either the parents to be able to speak a certain level of English, which was difficult for example in the Borneo Longhouse, or to have a translator who was fluent enough, such as our guest house owner in Luang Prabang and our tour guide in Saigon. I gradually became more confident about taking opportune moments such as in dress shops, or on a cooking tour in the Mekong delta.

As the weeks progressed I became more spontaneous and smooth in my questioning, and could get to the essence of the issue increasingly rapidly which enabled me to use opportunities as they presented. The more I got to know how interviewing worked the more I would anticipate when the best times would be to do it. Early mornings and late afternoons were optimal times,

Interviews in a Hanoi dress shop.

and I would wander around at those times looking for chance encounters. It was frustrating when I saw some ideal interaction when I didn’t have my camera, or when the battery was flat!

75 The Emotionally Connected Baby by Miranda Thorpe

Sometimes it felt too intrusive to film, and I had to be acutely sensitive to whether I had co- operation or not. I remember one evening in Hanoi I happened to see a grandmother helping her baby grandson to urinate in the gutter – the ten month old baby was wearing little cotton shorts, she brushed her hand lightly over his shorts to feel if his little penis was slightly hard (that is what the women in Vietnam said they did to see if the baby was ready to urinate) took

My husband Mark playing back the video to an interviewee in our Borneo Longhouse him to the pavement edge, took down his shorts, said “shshshsh” and he did a wee. It felt too intrusive to film this, but it was such a good example of this technique. Sometimes I got looks of disapproval or enquiry, as at times it must have seemed rather weird to them. Once I could explain people were amused or quite alright with it, but I couldn’t always explain as they might rush off, or the English was a problem.

The Vietnamese women I spoke with said it was easier to use Elimination Communication with a baby boy as it was more obvious when the baby needed to urinate. The caregiver could see quite clearly that his penis was slightly engorged and that he needed to eliminate or evacuate.

76 The Emotionally Connected Baby by Miranda Thorpe

Three shop assistants I interviewed laughed as they described how sometimes people would use an empty water bottle to catch the baby’s wee.

On the whole interviewees were consistently keen and helpful, though initially always a bit surprised that this was something that neither I nor people in the “rich” countries knew anything about. They would often be politely rather bewildered as if I was asking them “How do you eat...?” So if I asked them “How do you toilet train your babies so young...?” The standard answer was; “Like normal….?!”. When it gradually dawned on them that I was not familiar and had not raised my children “like normal” they emphasised how simple and easy it was.

Recurrent interviewee phrases of note across all cultures were “You have to do the best for your baby.” “Pampers are not good for the baby’s skin, they get red points (a rash).” “The doctor said not to use Snuggies.” “Only a lazy mother uses Pampers.” “You have to pay great attention at the start, but then it is easy.” “It’s very simple.” “It is more comfortable for the baby.”(“Pampers” and “Snuggies” were common euphemisms for any brand of disposable nappy.) “You do it like normal.”

Over the course of the seven months I interviewed over seventy parents and grandparents from Bali, Lombok, Burma, Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, Malaysia, India, Sri Lanka and the Maldives. All had started Elimination Communication by observing their babies in the first few weeks, but introduced the basin, garden, potty, toilet etc at varying months within the first year. Most reported that their babies were totally toilet trained well before 12 months. However, it was notable that every single interviewee said that their babies were toilet trained and nappy- free during the day by their first birthday. Many said that they were also dry at night by 12 months. Some said they used disposables at night till the babies were about 18 months. It was universally claimed by all the interviewees that they didn’t use night nappies after two years.

When I returned to New Zealand with this newly discovered information I obviously shared it with my daughter. By then our grandson was already nine months old, and it took a while for Jules’ parents to get on board with how Elimination Communication worked. I didn’t want to push it, and I was getting my head around it myself. However, I clearly remember encouraging them to put Jules in little pants or shorts whenever possible throughout that summer and to take the disposable or cloth nappy off at any convenient opportunity. I think this helped him to become more aware of his body. To this day if Jules is sick or sore he can convey it clearly and in more detail than his peers.

77 The Emotionally Connected Baby by Miranda Thorpe

By the time Jules was eighteen months he was being prepared for potty training. This I believe only came about because his parents now thought it was possible only as a result of hearing about thoughts on this topic, watching some interviews and hearing about my research in South East Asia. So their expectations of his capabilities changed, they didn’t follow their friends’ lead, and they began to believe he could be trained at this age. In actual fact they had been through the process of being ‘trained’ by our conversations and film clips of the interviews. So

Borneo Longhouse where we stayed overnight to interview this young mother my grandson Jules was potty trained by 20 months, and used the toilet exclusively soon after that. He accomplished it within a very short time, and with very few accidents. He is three and a half now, and yet some of his friends are still in nappies.

78 The Emotionally Connected Baby by Miranda Thorpe

During this seven month period of travelling through South East Asia I was particularly observant of whatever child rearing practices might contribute towards this evident relational bond that I witnessed all around me. In addition to the Elimination Communication attunement I also noticed there was much more direct skin to skin contact. This is a vital part of what helps both mother and baby increase their levels of oxytocin, colloquially called the “feel good chemical”.

Dr Nils Bergman developed a seminal study that had started in South America, called the “Kangaroo Mother Care Project” in Cape Town, South Africa. He designed slings for mothers to carry their premature babies strapped to the front of their bodies, skin to skin. He found and demonstrated that it was an essential ingredient for maturational development as this skin contact significantly enhanced the babies’ brains. (Bergman, 2005) Slings in the East were everywhere; they were usually a simple sarong with the baby strapped to the front of the body or the hip, and facing the mother or father. There were murals depicting the use of slings, and nobody had prams.

Slings are increasingly used in the West, which is great, but I have seen what I regard as a slightly disturbing trend of babies in slings facing into a crowd of strangers. That baby

79 The Emotionally Connected Baby by Miranda Thorpe

has no ability to check in with the parents’ faces, and must feel more disconnected, and possibly even anxious or frightened, rather than connected and safe. Again stimulation in our Western approach is given much greater emphasis and priority over relational connection.

I noticed that in the East the need for the parent’s, or anybody else’s, proximity is constantly emphasized be it for carrying, feeding, sleeping or playing. While I observed this ‘nesting cluster’ it reminded me of Tom Lewis’ description of repeated proximity experiments. In his book “A General Theory of Love” he well describes the impact of the mother mouse’s physical absence on the baby mice’s failure to thrive despite the nest environment being maintained with food and warmth. “The mammalian nervous system depends for its neurophysiologic stability on a system of interactive coordination, wherein steadiness comes from synchronization with nearby attachment figures…We call this mutually synchronizing exchange limbic regulation.”(p.85)

So we absolutely need proximity to good attachment figures for a healthy brain and nervous system. The endemic practices in Asia of breastfeeding, co-sleeping and sling use ensure that their babies are well cared for in this regard, but I wonder about our Western focus on a toddler’s need to develop separation, individuation, autonomy, self-sufficiency and independence. We have a philosophy of emphasizing the importance of, and in fact privileging, this developmental stage. We also have a tendency to pathologise dependence and inter-dependence, and label it as co-dependence. Have we been barking up the wrong tree with this attitude? Was it purely a defensive strategy to manage grief, loss and mourning after a long history of pioneers and explorers having been disconnected and wrenched away from the nest?

“As the nervous system matures, a baby reclaims some regulatory processes and performs them autonomously. Even after a peak parenting experience, children never transition to a fully self- tuning physiology. Adults remain social animals: they continue to require a source of stabilization outside themselves…people cannot be stable on their own – not should or shouldn’t be, but can’t be…Stability means finding people who regulate you well and staying near them.” (Lewis, Amini & Lannon, p.86)

80 The Emotionally Connected Baby by Miranda Thorpe

In fact one of the very worst punishments is to relegate somebody to solitary confinement that can drive people to the brink of insanity. So I believe that the stability referred to here is fostered by this early physical contact, as well as by holding one another in mind. As human beings this is crucial to our wellbeing.

However, we see a huge amount of expensive infant paraphernalia in the West separating skin contact between mother and baby, as well as fostering reliance on technology to hold our young; cribs, cots, intercom monitors, car capsules, baby bouncing chairs, “Jolly Jumper”, formula bottles, slings that face outwards, walking rings, car seats, prams, strollers, playpens, high chairs, separate beds and separate rooms. I believe that the intercom monitor system for example undermines parents of their trust in their own intuition, and encourages dependence on technological apparatus. The mother loses trust in her ability to detect her own offspring’s cry, or her instinctive body reactions to that cry.

She intuits his need and is praised for this. In general, the mother in particular, is somatically bonded to her child; she often knows intuitively, for example she feels a ‘stirring’ or ‘let down’ in her breasts when her baby cries and needs a feed, and will hear her own baby’s call from a

81 The Emotionally Connected Baby by Miranda Thorpe

long way off. Studies have shown that a new mother will intuitively hear the call of her own young in a nursery full of wailing new born babies. Yet the intercom strips her of her confidence in this intuitive connection. A lot of baby paraphernalia is the West emphasises cognitive developmental progress over emotional intelligence.

In the entire seven months travelling through cities in South East Asia and the Indian subcontinent I saw only three strollers or pushchairs despite the fact that I was definitely hypervigilant for anything resembling an infant. I myself was like a baby monitor - constantly on ‘baby alert’! My husband would help me by pointing out a potential video subject: “Baby alert at nine o’clock to your left”. I saw that the baby is constantly held in the embrace of parents, grand-parents, siblings, extended family and friends. There are the arms of a village there for a small child that provides endless security and nurturing. More importantly the mother is supported and helped by her family and by those around, who will keep an eye out for if she is feeling lonely and abandoned.

In Bali, the priest performs a ritual so that the baby can touch the ground for the first time at three months, and till then he is constantly carried, or placed on the bed for a nap. However, traditionally the newborn is placed on the father’s chest for a daytime nap if the mother needs to do other things. This probably had a practical origin for humans everywhere, in that the ground was often dusty or bare earth, and so the child was kept cleaner by being held, but now this has become a contemporary practice despite there being clean wooden, carpeted or tiled floors.

As an aside, and again referring to the Dunedin Study, interestingly it has been revealed that the more dirt a young child comes into contact with as he’s growing the greater his chances of improved immunity, fewer allergies or chances of asthma. Also the parents tend to be more relaxed if they don’t worry so much about the baby picking up germs, and being relaxed with the baby is the key.

I was told of a Vietnamese newly arrived family that was given a high chair for their toddler, only for the astonished, well meaning host to find it the following day on the curb side. The Vietnamese parents would never contemplate using a high chair for their child, but didn’t want to offend local Western custom or the generous welcome to New Zealand.

82 The Emotionally Connected Baby by Miranda Thorpe

Throughout Asia the skin contact was evident: I witnessed that the child slept in the parents’ bed, or in a hammock above their bed, suckled on his mother’s breast, her hand was used to feed him his first solids, and his father carried him as he grew. The baby moved from arms to a sling, to a lap, to a hip, to shoulders, to a crowded motorbike - a continuous relay of skin, touch and human embrace. Interestingly a Canadian Montreal study found that babies carried by their mothers for more than three hours per day, cried and fussed 51% less in evening hours (Hunziker and Barr, 1986).

In relation to skin contact how the mother initially reacted to the baby's excreta was fundamental. In the East I found everybody I interviewed to be relaxed and light hearted towards the child’s body waste, which is in stark contrast with the West, where the baby’s body fluids are referred to as "dirty" or "disgusting”. It is often said that the baby has “soiled” himself. I suspect this was influenced by the discovery of bacteria in the early 1900s, and the subsequent need to boil everything, including nappies. Surely this aversion must have had an effect consciously and unconsciously on a child if he was seen as ‘a germ spreader’, and a

83 The Emotionally Connected Baby by Miranda Thorpe

‘dirty’ carrier of contamination. If the mother in particular reacts with negativity to what he cannot control, but is a part of him, an extension of his body, he cannot but internalize this reaction and interpret it that he himself is ‘bad’.

Whilst travelling I noticed that there was more skin to skin contact between parent and child as they practiced Elimination Communication. The mother usually held the naked baby’s thighs as waited, holding him over the basin, potty, garden lawn, or wherever she decided to get him to urinate or defecate. In India I was told that women often cradle their babies from two month onwards with their feet supporting the baby’s bottom, while her hands held the child’s shoulders, with the baby facing the mother. An Indian grandmother I interviewed showed me how she did it. Then they put a sheet of paper down to catch the poo, if they anticipate that is what the child needs to do.

Particularly in these early stages, the baby's skin and body is seen by him as an extension of the self. The baby in the early months cannot differentiate between ‘me’ and ‘not me’ – he is not sure where he ends and where his mother begins. It takes months and years for him to get a sense of self and start to develop a separate identity. So the skin is an essentially important membrane relating to his early emotional experiences.

I was told by one interviewee that in India a mother is regarded as “a good mother” if when she is holding her child on her lap she experiences her lap as wet before the baby wees. She unconsciously anticipates his need to urinate, by herself feeling like she has wet herself, and this indicates to her that she needs to take him to a convenient place to help him eliminate. This is a good example of how the mother and the baby are one in this seamless exchange of unconscious communication.

84 The Emotionally Connected Baby by Miranda Thorpe

My observations of Asian societies

Wherever we travelled in South East Asia I noticed that it seemed to be predominantly the mothers and grandmothers who were in charge of the new borns, with fathers and grandfathers increasingly participating after the initial three months. Parents and grandparents very much set the frame and structure providing greater emotional safety and freedom for the baby. The psychotherapist likewise sets the frame for the client’s safety and provides a structured space so that the client can feel emotionally held.

On the other hand, in the West I’ve noticed that increasingly the toddler dictates what happens and when. More and more it is the baby or child who decides what he will eat when, and how and when he will sleep. This is necessary for the new born baby to have his needs met in a caring, attentive and sensitive manner. However, I’ve noticed it progressively taken too far when the toddler refuses to listen to instruction, and always sets the agenda. From my

85 The Emotionally Connected Baby by Miranda Thorpe

observations the parents have often abdicated and seem to lack the confidence to be in charge. Western mothers, and nowadays fathers, seem to have lost trust in their parental intuition and I believe that they all too readily relinquish their authority. In trying to ensure that the child is consulted and respected, the danger that I’ve witnessed is that at times it has gone too far in

A young Balinese mother take her bare bottomed baby, make her sling out of her sarong, hops onto her motorbike to go home with her baby in one hand and her groceries in the other after visiting her mother at the shop.

86 The Emotionally Connected Baby by Miranda Thorpe

the opposite direction and that the child has become the all-powerful, indulged dictator. Tyrannies of any kind are not conducive to respectful harmonious familial relationships.

I saw that in the East repeatedly interviewees deferred to grandmothers for child rearing knowledge, and they were held them in high regard. “You have to listen to your seniors – they have the experience” says a young Indian mother. Whenever possible, grandmothers were involved in helping their daughters and daughters-in-law during the initial months after birth.

A sibling feeds her younger brother with a bottle of formula milk.

87 The Emotionally Connected Baby by Miranda Thorpe

Often parents were in their early twenties, so the grandparents were probably middle-aged. However, there were some grumblings in ‘off the record’ remarks as some grandparents alluded to the younger generation’s disregard of what Neufeld calls a “vertical transmission” of elders’ experience. In the countries that we visited the energetic and usually actively involved grandparents complained that the youth now gleaned information instead from a “horizontal” direction from their contemporaries and social media. (Neufeld, 2005)

To my distress during my last trip in Bali I noticed many more parents obsessively glued to their cell phones or iPads, and ignoring their children in a way that I had not seen before. The reference to FaceBook was a constant theme as people would ask to be connected with us via this medium. The internet use was affordable and widespread. As traveller with no local contract we had wi-fi accessibility everywhere – in every home stay, guest house, cafe, restaurant, and even on public transport. Everybody in South East Asia where we travelled had cheap, rapid, accessible internet connection, which put our service providers in New Zealand to shame. However, it meant that everybody was internet savvy and using their phones constantly, even on the beaches.

Teenagers universally have a preoccupation with ‘selfies’ and this certainly extended to what we observed in this part of the Asian continent. This narcissistic preening and self-absorption was playing right into the hands of the commercialist internet, both trends exacerbating the other. I saw an increase in avarice addiction everywhere, as well as a neglect of the old family ways of talking and communing that had felt so charming when we first visited Bali. Where families had interacted and played on the beaches five years earlier, now sadly cell phones dominated just about all the young families with both parents glued to their devices, and the babies and toddlers left to their own devices....

We also saw other changes such as an ever increasing number of babies using formula in milk bottles. We noticed a marked deterioration in the standard of food in that it was more ‘fast food’ and cooked in palm oil. There was an increase in packaged imported convenience Asian food, mostly wrapped in plastic. We also noticed many more children being quite overweight, more children had rotten teeth from eating too many sweets, and there was more ‘plastic’ junk food

88 The Emotionally Connected Baby by Miranda Thorpe

being sold in beach stalls and school tuck shops which was distressing. There was also a huge increase in plastic wrappers containing the ‘plastic’ junk food, which contributed towards the ‘unburnable’ rubbish dumps. Also to my consternation more toddlers and even children were using disposables at an ever older age. Again this was evidence of a very rapidly changing commercialised movement to use babies and children for profit, and to exploit children and parents.

A Balinese father with his seven month old son in underpants.

89 The Emotionally Connected Baby by Miranda Thorpe

Our Indian TukTuk driver in his Kerala home with his 11 month old son

As I continued with my seven month long ‘baby observation’ my respect for the male members of any given family grew markedly. Fathers and grandfathers were notably visible, affectionate, demonstrative and interactive in the raising of their offspring. All the fathers that I observed were clearly very proud and loving. The modern South East Asian family typically comprises of an early twenties couple actively co-parenting with two children spaced apart by at least a couple of years, often by about five years. Family planning is taken very seriously, and typically the second child is planned after the mother has returned to work for a while.

Recently I heard of an Indian family who had immigrated to New Zealand continuing with their traditions as new settlers. The grandmother organised a small apartment across the road from where they were living. This was for her daughter-in-law as soon as she had delivered her baby. The custom was for the new mother to have a quiet enclosed space in which she can attend

90 The Emotionally Connected Baby by Miranda Thorpe

exclusively to her baby and so bond with her child. The mother, or often the mother-in-law, living across the road would come in throughout that month to check on the pair, and to clean and provide both food and company when the new mother needed it. The focus was entirely for the mother and baby to get to know one another and bond at a deeply intimate level. This was

A father in Maldives with his five month old son in underpants.

91 The Emotionally Connected Baby by Miranda Thorpe

necessary for a good attachment. This fostered familiarity between the two, and was preparation for the maternal preoccupation and the focus on the Elimination Communication that would follow. Not everybody can be ‘held’ in this way, or has a mother or mother-in-law to be so supportive or containing. So maybe we could start a movement for fathers, neighbours or family members to pitch in for the first month to provide this kind of support. This would only happen if the value of this method is highlighted and deemed necessary to forestall post-natal depression, and enhance good attachment.

In South East Asia it seemed from what people told me that mothers usually stayed at home for at least the first six months, with grandparents supporting or raising the babies and toddlers if the parents returned to work. Supporting them is the extended family, the temple priests, and often the governments. A couple of Vietnamese and Southern Indian interviewees told me that their Communist or Socialist governments gave a year’s maternity leave, and when they did return to work mothers started an hour later, were given time off to return home at lunch to breast feed, and left work an hour earlier than others. There was an expectation that the government/community/parent supported the family to support the baby. “It takes a village to raise a child” was put into practise.

Many of the working women I noticed along the way such as in Bali, Thailand, Laos, and Vietnam also took their babies to work and this seemed totally acceptable to their communities. Often there was a father or grandparent there to help mind the baby as she worked in the shop or market stall preparing food, or selling clothes. I saw many fathers and grandparents in particular take charge of nap time, and carry the baby around, or have the baby lie on their chests for a short sleep.

Another significant observation I had was that the adults’ expectations of babies’ capabilities were much greater. Interviewees frequently stressed how intelligent young babies were and not to underestimate them; “The baby learns very young from the parents.” “The little baby is very smart”, “Babies can do many things” and “The baby learns so much in the first three months”. Again this notion of the baby’s intentionality and desire to learn was very evident in all the interviews that I conducted.

There haven’t been many extensive studies on this topic, but one of note was done forty years ago in East Africa. Marten and Rachel de Vries from the Departments of Psychiatry and Anthropology respectively, at the University of Rochester, New York lived for a year with the

92 The Emotionally Connected Baby by Miranda Thorpe

Digo tribe of East Africa. It is really worth noting their conclusions about indigenous child rearing practices and parental expectations;

“Mothers stated “a baby is ready to learn” soon after birth, and expect a high degree of motor and social achievement at 3 to 5 months” and “...(mothers) stated that they initiated bowel and bladder training during the first few weeks of life and expected or had accomplished reasonable night and day dryness by 4 to 6 months.” (1977)

The Digo mothers did not doubt their new borns’ abilities, and had a natural benign expectation that their babies would be able to do this. The babies naturally picked up on this expectation and carried on to fulfil that. The expectations that these mothers held in their mind seemed to be vital in what was evoked and then transpired in their offspring.

I was also fascinated by an additional example of unconscious transmission in that many of the parents I interviewed also expected to feel somatic connections with their offspring. They reported feeling strong body sensations that resonated with their children’s, long after childhood, and indeed throughout their child’s adult life. I was told by several mothers that they “just feel it” in their bodies. One mother told me that she just intuits, and admits that sometimes she’ll announce it aloud, when her teenage children need to go to the bathroom, just in synchrony as when that teenager needs to go. She’s not telling they need to go, she’s just announcing aloud that she understands that they need to go to the bathroom.

Mothers in particular said that they also feel a somatic “resonance” when their children and adult children are sick, and have many types of “inexplicable” body communications. An Indian woman explained, “If my daughter at university feels sick, I feel it in my body, at the same time as she does, in a similar way – and I just know she’s not well, so I give her a call on her cell phone”. It implies an unconscious and pre-verbal communication that begins early in the dyad’s relationship, but that I believe is either initiated or at least greatly fostered and enhanced by using Elimination Communication. Maybe some Westerners would label this intrusive, boundariless, pathological enmeshment and yet other cultures may call it normal, close or relational connection.

Individual subjective somatic sensitivity is I believe another adjunct to the advantages of using this Elimination Communication practice. The adults interviewed reported that their children,

93 The Emotionally Connected Baby by Miranda Thorpe

as well as their adult children, could describe their body sensations in minute detail and that these were linked to their emotions. They conveyed their needs and discomfort consciously and unconsciously so that the parents could intuit the communication. If the child has an ability to be aware of, and the more importantly describe, his or her physical and emotional feelings in such detail, then there is less need to get the parent to intuit them. There is also less need for ‘primitive’, or early, methods of communication such as projective identification. So people seemed to pick up more readily on each other’s emotional life, and be more prepared, and considerably more able, to describe their external as well as their internal worlds.

Throughout our travels I noticed that communal living was strikingly rich and prevalent irrespective of differing ethnic, financial, religious, caste or educational circumstances. Families lived in close quarters in small or large huts, dwellings, apartments, houses, and sometimes within compounds, with displays of intergenerational dependence and respect. There was an honouring of the elderly, of their experience, wisdom and status in the family and in the community. The frail, very elderly and people with disabilities were taken care of and included in most activities.

Every country that we explored had a spiritual mesh supporting its communities, albeit that there were a variety of religions underpinning the thirteen Asian countries through which we travelled. I was surprised at a seeming tolerance for a difference of cultures and practices within several of the counties that we visited, and people proudly told us of their juxtaposed faiths. The spirituality, of whatever denomination, strongly connected each individual community, despite there being evidence of mushrooming consumerism and a clear addiction to ‘Western’ products and mores.

Never the less it seemed to sit compatibly alongside a time honoured valuing of family and ancestral traditions. I would joke with my interviewees about how I increasingly used a sarong and honoured some of their old traditional ways, such as valuing Elimination Communication, as they donned their smart new T-shirts with a cell phone in their jeans back pocket. Interestingly these very modern youngsters whom I interviewed would still emphasise the need to use Elimination Communication as they continued to believe that it was clearly the best for their baby.

94 The Emotionally Connected Baby by Miranda Thorpe

Vietnamese families were visibly connected and relational.

However much the youth mimicked the Western ways, they rarely talked about leaving their countries. Emigration had actually been impossible for some interviewees who had tried it briefly, but had returned to be close to their families. They had become depressed when living overseas, ranging from a few months to a couple of years, and in a variety of places such as United Kingdom, Russia, Australia and Saudi Arabia. However, they said that it wasn’t the difficulties of living in those countries that brought them home, but rather that it was “unbearable” to be parted from their families. The overwhelming majority of those interviewed reported a strong attachment to family, to living in close proximity, to being close, with a need to be physically and emotionally in touch. Again “close” could mean adhesively attached, demanding, controlling, with little personal space, so not necessarily benign and harmonious, but not withstanding that, it was certainly relational and connected, as opposed to isolated and indifferent.

95 The Emotionally Connected Baby by Miranda Thorpe

One Indian man in his late twenties described how terribly difficult it was for him to go to live in Russia for a year or two. In desperation he felt compelled to return to live with his parents in southern India. It wasn’t the weather, rather that many customs were too different in Moscow, and one of them was how they raised their small children. With considerable tearful

Indian school children in Delhi, jostling to connect with us.

emotion, he described his shock at seeing that his host’s four year old son was put to bed in a separate room from his parents. He said he had “never seen such a thing as this” in Kerala in his whole life. His Indian colleague added how important it was for the baby to sleep next to the mother for the first six months, but she stressed that it was important to keep the baby sleeping on the mother’s left side to be “near to the mother’s heart so as to feel her power”.

96 The Emotionally Connected Baby by Miranda Thorpe

Life in a western city is notoriously anonymous, lonely and detached. However, I didn’t see or detect any evidence of this as we travelled, for example, city life in Vietnam, India or Thailand was full of bustling communities of people interacting and communicating in the streets, markets, temples, businesses and malls, and I believe cars are a compartmentalising ‘bubble’ that keeps us disconnected and separated in our communities.

I am not romanticising the East. I certainly can see that there are difficulties and fractious relationships and communities. However I believe that Elimination Communication helps towards what might otherwise be even more conflictual societies. I suspect that it ‘oils the wheels’ and contributes towards more relational communication. Each group all over the world will have tribal, inherited history, religious and ethnic diversity causing problems. Some might say the level of connectedness is purely down to different ethnic propensities. However, I do believe that using Elimination Communication provides a means to Mentalization and enhancing individual relating whatever the ethnicity, and which may improve group relations.

We lived in a more relational world centuries ago, before the Industrial Revolution in Europe precipitated radical change to our communities and family systems. We must have used Elimination Communication and been so attuned before the disruption of mass urbanisation. In the West, particularly in the New World pioneering countries, we prize independence, stoicism, self-reliance, autonomy and self-sufficiency, and even detachment - but at what cost? The stage of separation-individuation is a highly acclaimed developmental achievement, and personal dependence is seen as vulnerability and weakness.

However the reality is that we live in a rapidly changing world. Many communities do not have the luxury of choice, and millions of refugees and displaced people move countries and lose their cultures. I noticed how the Eurocentric Red Cross readily hands out disposables in their ‘survival’ packs, indicating little awareness of how other cultures operate. In my more cynical moments I fear that this is driven by fiscal greed. I believe that these are the very people who should more adherently stick to their true and tested practices such as using Elimination Communication and raising their young in a proven, time honoured way. However, Asia is moving increasingly towards using disposable nappies because the globalisation of western trends, and the use of a disposable implies a wealthy modern lifestyle, is seen as a status symbol.

97 The Emotionally Connected Baby by Miranda Thorpe

This also applies to formula feeding infants. I am not referring to the mother who for whatever physiological or psychological reason cannot or chooses not to breast feed her infant. I am referring to the parent who has been predominantly influenced by advertising, and believes that it is a status symbol to use formula for her baby. I believe that this is an abhorrent commercialization of our vulnerable and impressionable human beings, yet companies avidly promote this philosophy with their innuendos and subliminal messages in advertisements and promotions. This is a terrible exploitation and abuse simply for financial gain.

98 The Emotionally Connected Baby by Miranda Thorpe

Conclusion

I have highlighted the facets of various dangers; environmental dangers to our planet and to our local water tables, the potential health hazards to our offspring through heat and chemical toxicity, the physical and psychological risks of late toilet training and the dangers of neglect through using disposables. In contrast I have described the healthy simplicity and ease, as well as the psychological, emotional, financial and practical advantages of using the traditional method of Elimination Communication.

In the process of doing this research I uncovered an absence of integration of these disparate issues, but most significantly it has revealed both the West’s and the East’s blindness to the psychological and emotional importance. I am attempting to bridge the traditional indigenous and the ‘developed’ Western worlds by shining a light on this hitherto blind spot. This method of Elimination Communication is what the East takes so for granted, and what we have seldom thought about.

I propose that this could be a reparative missing link for some of the West’s dysfunction. The mother who is so acutely tuned in for the first few weeks to her new born’s bodily functions, in such a detailed and observant manner, must be linked, and seemingly is linked, at a deeply relational level for many years. From my continuous observations as an experienced psychotherapist over a period of half a year, I conclude that the practice of Elimination Communication is an extremely important key ingredient. I believe that it is this mother-child relationship enhanced by Elimination Communication that maintains their closeness consciously and unconsciously through an enhanced psychological, emotional and somatic connection. This then subsequently has the ripple effect of influencing the parental, familial and community inter-relationships. I also felt that it was never too late; that practising Elimination Communication even at a later age and stage in the baby’s life would be beneficial to both caregiver and child, make them more connected, and help the infant to connect to himself.

What does an Eastern society lose with a transition to a more ‘Westernised’ model that priorities separateness and individuality? They trade attunement, closeness and touch for a colonisation of paraphernalia that separates us as human beings; formula, disposable nappies, capsules, high chairs, playpens, strollers, crèche and cars. The youth of the East are being seduced by these glittering symbols of status, the pseudo connection of a consumerist world promoted by social

99 The Emotionally Connected Baby by Miranda Thorpe

media. Without any awareness these people are letting something important slip through their fingers. They are losing what they have that is precious and valuable, their nugget of real gold.

It will be so terribly sad if the human race loses this opportunity to save something so important. We in the West have a ‘blind spot’ about this issue, since we don’t know about it, but so do people in the East because they can’t imagine that we don’t know about it. I believe what people in the East currently take for granted is a vital intuitive and relational parenting skill that contributes towards deep individual, familial and community connection. I worry that the traditional indigenous child rearing ways that have contributed to this very connection are being eroded all too rapidly, that the East is losing its capacity to hold its own cultural traditions in mind, and is blindly making a very valuable asset disposable.

100 The Emotionally Connected Baby by Miranda Thorpe

References

Anderson, R.C., & Anderson, J.H. (1999) Acute respiratory effects of diaper emissions. Archives of Environmental Health: An International Journal 54:(5) 353-358

Azrin, N. H. & Foxx, R.M. (1989) Toilet training in less than a day. Pocket Books, New York.

Ball, T.S. (1971) Toilet training an infant Mongoloid at the breast. California mental health digest 9:456-461

Bannon, M.J., Carter, Y. Practical Paediatric Problems in Primary Care. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

Bauer, I. (2006) Diaper Free! The Gentle Wisdom of Natural Infant Hygiene. New York: Plume Penguin.

Bergman, N. (2005) “More than a cuddle: skin-to-skin contact is key” The Practising Midwife, 8 (9): 29

Bigelow, A.E., Littlejohn, M., Bergman, N., & McDonald, C. (2010) The relation between early mother-infant skin-to-skin contact and later maternal sensitivity in South African mothers of low birth weight infants. Infant Mental Health Journal, 31 (3); 358-377.

Bion, W. (1962) Learning from Experience. London: Heinemann.

Blum, N., Taubman, B., & Nemeth, N. (2003 April) Relationship between age at initiation of toilet training and duration of training: A prospective study. Pediatrics, 111 (4):810-14.

Boucke, L. (2008) Infant Potty Training: A Gentle and Primeval Method Adapted to Modern Living. Lafayette, Colorado: White-Boucke.

101 The Emotionally Connected Baby by Miranda Thorpe

Clark, E. (2007) The Real Toy Story: Inside the Ruthless Battle for America’s Youngest Consumers. New York: Free Press. de Vries, M. & de Vries, R. (1977) Cultural relativity of toilet training readiness: A perspective from East Africa. Pediatrics, 60: 170-177 (15) Cooper, M., Shaver, P., Collins, N. (1998). "Attachment styles, emotion regulation, and adjustment in adolescence". Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 74 (5): 1380–97. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.74.5.1380. PMI

Dezateux, C., Rosendahl K. (2007) Developmental dysplasia of the hip. The Lancet, 369 (9572) 1541-1552 doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(07)60710-7

Douglas, H. (2007) Containment and reciprocity: Integrating Psychoanalytic Theory and Child Development Research for work with Children. East Sussex: Routledge.

Environmental Protection Agency (2012) “Municipal Solid Waste Generation, Recycling, and Disposal in the United States facts and figures for 2012”. Retrieved March 2014 from www.epa.gov/osw/nonhaz/municipal/msw99.hdm Enviornmental Protection Agency (1990) “Integrated Risk Assessment for Dioxins and Furans from Chlorine Bleaching in Pulp and Paper Mills”. 560/5-90-011

Fenichel, O. (1945) The psychoanalytic theory of neurosis. New York: Norton

Fisher, S. & Greenberg, R.P. (1977) The scientific credibility of Freud’s theories and therapy. New York: Basic Books

Fonagy, P., Gergely, G., Jurist E.L., Target, M., (2004) Affect regulation, mentalization and the development of the self. London: Karnac

“Global Market for Disposables Baby Diapers to Reach $26.6 Billion by 2012, according to a New Report by Global Industry Analysts, Inc.” Press release by Global Industry Analysts, Inc., October 22, 2008,

102 The Emotionally Connected Baby by Miranda Thorpe

http://www.prweb.com/releases/diapers_disposable/baby_infant/prweb1503344.htm (accessed 2014)

Gross-Loh, C. (2007) The Diaper-Free Baby: The Natural Toilet Training Alternative. New York: William Morrow

Hann, M., Malan, A., Kronson, M., Bergman, N., Huskisson, R. (1999) Kangaroo Mother Care. South African Medical Journal 89; 37-40.

Hellstrom, A.L., Sillen, U. (2001) Early potty training advantageous in bladder dysfunction. Decreases the risk of urinary infection (in Swedish). Lakartidningen 98:3216-3219. Ned Tijdschr Geneeskd., 147(1):27-31 Hopgood M., (2012) How Eskimos Keep their Babies Warm: and other adventures in parenting (from Argentina to Tanzania and everywhere in between) New York: Algoquin Books

Hunziker, U., & Barr, R. (1986 May) Increased Carrying Reduces Infant Crying: A Randomized Controlled Trial.” Pediatrics 77 (5) 641-48

Landmark Consultancy Group (1991) “A Review of Proter & Gamble’s Environmental Balances for Disposable and Re-usable Nappies”.

Masling, J. (1999) An Evaluation of Empirical Research Linked to Psychoanalytic Theory. Paper presented on June 11 1999 at the Annual Meeting of the Rapaport_klein Study Group. Accessed online (June 9, 2014) Retrieved from http://www.psychomedia.it/rapaport- klein/masling99.htm

Neufeld, G., & Mate, G. (2005) Hold on to your kids. New York: Ballantine Books.

“NHS project tackles rising number of children starting school still wearing nappies” (2013, Sept) Retrieved from http://www.daynurseries.co.uk. “What the scientific evidence reveals about the timing of toilet training”. (2010) www.parentingscience.com/science-of-toilet-training.html

103 The Emotionally Connected Baby by Miranda Thorpe

Partasch C-J., Aukamp, M., Sippell W.G., (2000) Scrotal temperature is increased in disposable plastic lined nappies. Archives of Disease in Childhood 83:364-368 doi:10. 1136/adc.83.4.364

Potty Whispering: The Gentle Art of Infant Potty Training. (2006) ( DVD) Colorado: White- Bourke Publishing Inc. Poulton, R; Moffit, T; Silva, P; “The Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study: overview of the first 40 years, with an eye to the future” (2015) Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology, 50 (5) 679-693

Richer, C. (2012) Disposable Diaper History. The Disposable Diaper Industry Source, http://disposablediaper.net/general-information/disposable-diaper-history/ The Disposable Diaper Industry Source published by Richer Investment Diaper Consulting, Retrieved (2013) from www.disposablediaper.net

Lewis, T., Amini F., & Lannon, R. (2000) A General Theory of Love New York: Random House.

“Researchers at UMDNJ-Robert Wood Johnson Medical School and Bristol-Myers Squibb Children’s Hospital at Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital Pinpoint Best Time to Begin Toilet Training for Children.” Robert Wood Johnson Medical School News Release, January 8, 2010, http://rwjms.umdnj.edu/news_publications/news_release/Barone_Toilet_Training_Chidlren.ht ml (Retrieved 2014)

Schore, A.N. (1994) Affect regulation and the origin of the self: The neurobiology of emotional development. New Jersey: Erlbaum.

Sillen, U. & Hanson, E. (2000) Control of voiding means better emptying of the bladder in children with congenital dilating VUR. British Journal of Urology, 58:13

104 The Emotionally Connected Baby by Miranda Thorpe

Smeets, P.M., Lancioni, G.E., Ball, T.S., & Oliva, D.S. (1985) Shaping self-initiated toileting in infants. Journal of applied behaviour analysis, 18:303-308

Stemple, J. “P&G Settles Pampers Dry Max Diaper-Rash Lawsuit” Reuters. Retrieved (August 2014) from www.snopes.com/medical/toxins/huggies.asp

Stern, D.N. (1985) The interpersonal world of the infant. New York: Basic Books

Winnicott, D. W. (1974) Fear of breakdown. The International Journal of Psychoanalysis

I have obtained permission from all interviewees filmed during our travels.

105 The Emotionally Connected Baby by Miranda Thorpe

Synopsis for back page

This book is about a valuable global parental skill that is rapidly being lost. This skill of early gentle toilet training (Elimination Communication) is a traditional indigenous method of using timing, intuition and sounds with minimal use of cloth or disposable nappies. The advantage of this method is a stronger body connection that leads to a deeper attachment between the caregiver and baby. This method leads to improving conscious and unconscious awareness between caregiver and baby that subsequently helps the child to be more in tune with his or her own body and feelings. This enhances awareness and a relational way of being that impacts on individual and societal communication. The by products are that the children, as well as the environment, are protected from possible physical dangers, and from our world’s accumulating non- biodegradable waste. In this unique book she sheds light upon, and integrates, the physical, emotional, and environmental aspects of this fascinating topic. She concludes that indigenous toilet training methods are an invaluable portal to deeper attachments, and to healthier and more relational connections.

Biography:

Miranda, an experienced psychotherapist and grandmother, takes us into the world of indigenous child rearing and helps us appreciate the dying skill of benign toilet training with new born babies. In 2013, together with her husband, she backpacked round South East Asia for seven months, observing young infants and their caregivers, and conducting over 70 interviews with parents. Miranda stresses the importance of Elimination Communication as a means to an improved and deeper bonding with one’s baby.

Miranda works as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist in private practice in Auckland, New Zealand. Born in Norwich in the United Kingdom, she was raised in The Gambia, Uganda, Portugal and London before living in Cape Town, South Africa for a couple of decades. Miranda immigrated to New Zealand in 1994, is married to a psychologist, has six adult children, two adult step children and three grandchildren.

106 The Emotionally Connected Baby by Miranda Thorpe

107 The Emotionally Connected Baby by Miranda Thorpe

108 The Emotionally Connected Baby by Miranda Thorpe