A question I am asked about Go Time–Potty Time Early Learning is how a toilet learning program can be a whole-centre, whole-family, whole-childhood approach without becoming impossibly complex to deliver.
The answer is that it has to be that broad, because the milestone itself is. Toilet learning happens in a child’s life, across multiple environments, several adult relationships, the rhythms of a working week, and a stage of development where the learning becomes harder to consolidate when it is delayed. Treating it as a private physical skill produces a program that asks one part of a child’s world to change something the rest of the world is shaping. Treating it as an ecological process, with the structure to support every part of that ecology, produces something the Australian early childhood sector has not had before.
This article explains how Urie Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory shapes the design of Go Time–Potty Time Early Learning, and why a milestone this universal demands a framework this broad.
Why Bronfenbrenner
Urie Bronfenbrenner was the developmental psychologist who first argued, in the late 1970s, that a child cannot be understood in isolation from the environments shaping them. His ecological systems theory describes development as occurring within five nested systems, each containing roles, norms, relationships, and processes that influence child outcomes, and each interacting with the others. His later work added the dimension of time to the framework, and his Bioecological Model identified proximal processes (the regular, sustained, increasingly complex interactions between a child and their immediate environment) as the engines of development.
Bronfenbrenner’s theory is one of the most widely cited frameworks in developmental science. It is foundational to Head Start in the United States, and influences early childhood frameworks across Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia, including the Early Years Learning Framework. It is also the framework against which Go Time–Potty Time Early Learning was built, because no other model captures both the breadth and the precision required to address toilet learning as it actually occurs in a child’s life.
The microsystem: where development happens
The microsystem is the most immediate level of a child’s environment, the face-to-face setting where direct developmental experiences occur. For many toddlers, the two primary microsystems are the family home and the early learning centre. Each has its own routines, language, relationships, and physical features, and each exerts the most powerful and immediate influence on the child of any of the five ecological systems.
Go Time–Potty Time Early Learning addresses microsystem quality directly. Shared educator language and consistent routines across all rooms create the predictable, stable environment that proximal processes require. Visual routine posters at child eye level make the physical environment itself an active participant in the learning. The storybook, read regularly in group time, becomes the central proximal process: regular, sustained, increasingly complex as the child’s lived experience accumulates around it, and genuinely reciprocal because the child responds emotionally and cognitively to the characters.
The mesosystem: where the work holds or breaks down
The mesosystem is the connection between a child’s microsystems, the interactions between home and centre that determine whether the two environments support the child coherently or contradict one another. Bronfenbrenner argued that a strong mesosystem exerts some of the most powerful developmental influence of any system in the model. Four decades of subsequent research has confirmed it. Children with strong home-school mesosystems show higher developmental achievement across language, social-emotional development, and physical independence. Parent-teacher communication quality independently predicts child outcomes over and above the quality of either environment individually.
For toilet learning, the mesosystem is where the work either holds or breaks down. A child cannot internalise a new self-help skill if the two settings they spend most of their week in are teaching two different things. Different language. Different routines. Different responses. Different teaching.
The mesosystem intervention is the most distinctive feature of Go Time–Potty Time Early Learning. The same storybook lives in both settings. The same visual cues sit in both bathrooms. Shared response protocols are used in both settings. The parent education portal draws on the same evidence base the educator training is built from, so families and educators are working from a shared understanding of readiness, regression, withholding, and what to do when learning stalls.
When the systems around a child speak the same language, the child can focus on the skill, not on managing two different worlds.
The exosystem: where support flows in
The exosystem contains settings the child does not directly inhabit but which shape the microsystems they do. The parent’s workplace, professional development systems, allied health services, and the broader sector infrastructure all sit at this level.
Go Time–Potty Time Early Learning intervenes here through three deliberate mechanisms. Tiered educator training addresses the exosystem-level gap in professional development for toilet learning, converting it into improved microsystem quality through better-equipped educators. The Centre Partnership Manager functions as a positive exosystem actor, providing the implementation guidance and quality monitoring that enables microsystem educators to deliver the program with confidence. The OT-informed early intervention pathway connects the centre microsystem to specialist health expertise when the universal program is not sufficient for a particular child.
Bronfenbrenner’s principle here is simple: exosystem resources that improve developmental outcomes must be channelled through the microsystem relationships the child actually inhabits. Training, monitoring, and specialist support do nothing for the child unless they reach the educator standing next to that child during their toilet learning. The program is structured to ensure they do.
The macrosystem: where the gap was created
The macrosystem describes the broad cultural, policy, and ideological context within which all other systems operate. It is the slowest-moving of Bronfenbrenner’s systems, and the one most responsible for the conditions Go Time–Potty Time Early Learning exists to address.
Several macrosystem-level shifts have collectively produced the current state of toilet learning in Australia. The cultural normalisation of disposable nappies has removed the sensation of wetness, one of the natural physiological prompts for toilet learning. Child-centred guidance to 'wait until the child is ready' has been widely misinterpreted as 'wait as long as you need', removing the structured support that previous generations provide. The rapid increase in centre-based care has shifted the primary environment of toilet learning from home to ECEC without any corresponding shift in the sector’s readiness or resourcing to take it on. The cultural assumption that toilet learning is a family responsibility has not adjusted to the social reality that most Australian children now spend the majority of their week in care during the toilet learning window. Neither families nor services have been given a clear answer about who should lead, and the milestone has fallen into the gap between them.
These are not individual parenting choices or centre-level oversights. They are macrosystem conditions that any program working in this space has to recognise, name, and design against.
The chronosystem: where timing decides outcomes
Bronfenbrenner added the chronosystem to his later work to capture the dimension of time, both the timing of events in a child’s life and the broader historical changes that reshape the developmental context across generations.
The chronosystem matters for toilet learning in two distinct ways.
First, the developmental window of optimal readiness is time-limited. Research identifies 18 to 24 months as the period during which readiness signals emerge and within which supported toilet learning is most effective. A program that reaches a child in this window produces fundamentally different outcomes from the same program reaching the same child at 36 to 48 months, because the underlying developmental biology and neurological plasticity of the earlier window support faster, easier learning. The chronosystem is the difference between meeting the milestone and missing it.
Second, the chronosystem accounts for the historical pattern that has produced the current crisis. In the 1950s and 1960s, 97% of children were toilet trained by age 3. By the late 2000s, research placed that figure at 51%. That decline is the accumulation of macrosystem changes (disposable nappies, the misreading of child-led guidance, the workforce shift, the silence) over several decades. The chronosystem lens makes clear that this is a historical pattern, not a developmental one, and historical patterns that have changed once can change again with appropriate system-level intervention.
Go Time–Potty Time Early Learning is structured as that intervention. It is not designed to be added to a centre’s curriculum at age 4, when delay has already accumulated. It is designed to meet children when they are ready, at the front edge of their developmental window, while there is still time for the program to do its developmental work efficiently and without struggle.
Proximal processes: the engines of development
Bronfenbrenner’s mature theory placed proximal processes at the centre of development. These are the regular, sustained, increasingly complex, reciprocal interactions between a child and their immediate environment. He called them the engines of development. They are also the most precise lens through which to understand how Go Time–Potty Time Early Learning works.
Every core element of the program is engineered against the three tests Bronfenbrenner identified for a true proximal process. The storybook is read regularly and becomes progressively more meaningful as the child’s toilet experience accumulates. The Quest system provides the progressively more complex challenge sequence that proximal processes require. The visual routine, repeated daily, builds the habituated sequence that habit formation depends on. The response protocols are reciprocal, calm, and consistent every time, building rather than rupturing the adult-child relationship that proximal processes depend on.
This is what Bronfenbrenner meant when he said proximal processes are the engines of development. They are not background features. They are the mechanism through which development actually occurs, and Go Time–Potty Time Early Learning is built to make them work.
The synthesis
What makes Go Time–Potty Time Early Learning distinctive is not its alignment with one or two of Bronfenbrenner’s systems. It is the way it operates simultaneously across all five, with proximal processes engineered into the design at every level.
Centres that try to address toilet learning at the microsystem alone produce a program that holds at the centre and unravels at home. Approaches that target families alone produce inconsistency the moment the child enters care. Sector-level training without microsystem implementation produces educators who know what to do without the resources to do it. Policy alignment without proximal process design produces a program that satisfies frameworks but does not move children.
Bronfenbrenner’s contribution to developmental science was the insistence that you cannot help a child by working on only one part of their world. Go Time–Potty Time Early Learning is the operationalisation of that principle, applied to a milestone the sector has historically tried to manage at the level of the individual child, in the individual nappy change, in the individual moment of frustration or success.
The mesosystem is where the work holds. The chronosystem is when the work matters. The microsystem is how the work happens. The exosystem is what makes it sustainable. The macrosystem is the reason the work is needed at all.
Children navigating the most significant self-help milestone of their early years deserve a framework that recognises all of this, and a program built to act on every part of it.
Monica Barker is the founder of My Binkie Bear and the creator of Go Time–Potty Time Early Learning, an evidence-based framework for toilet learning in early childhood settings. Drawing on developmental psychology, occupational therapy and the paediatric continence evidence base, her work reframes toilet learning as an area of intentional teaching rather than a task families manage and the centre merely supports.
References:
Bronfenbrenner, U. (1979). The Ecology of Human Development: Experiments by Nature and Design. Harvard University Press.
Bronfenbrenner, U., & Morris, P. A. (2006). The bioecological model of human development. In R. M. Lerner (Ed.), Handbook of Child Psychology, Vol. 1: Theoretical Models of Human Development (6th ed., pp. 793 to 828). Wiley.
Brazelton, T. B. (1962). A child-oriented approach to toilet training. Pediatrics, 29, 121 to 128.
The Restraint Project, University of New South Wales. (2010). Toilet Training in Australia.