Readiness Is Not a Moment That Arrives. It Is Something We Build.
Here is a question I keep asking early childhood leaders, and the pause before the answer tells me everything.
Environments for every kind of learning are built by design. We plan intentionally for language, for early numeracy, for fine motor skills, for friendships and emotional regulation. We observe, we scaffold, we document, we reflect. We know that readiness for any of these is something a child grows into through experience, not something that simply switches on one morning.
So why, when it comes to toilet learning, is it left out? Why is this one milestone singled out and left to families alone, when every other aspect of a child’s development is taught in ECEC with structure, intention and scaffolded?
The myth of the readiness moment
There is a quiet belief running through a lot of practice in our sector: that toilet learning begins when a child is ready, and that readiness is a moment to wait for. A child wakes up dry, or shows interest in the toilet, or tells us they do not like the feeling of a wet nappy, and we take that as the starting point.
But readiness does not arrive. It grows, well before a child ever sits on a toilet, through everything a child comes to understand about their own body, about routine, about language, about what is expected and what is safe. By the time a child shows the signs we are taught to watch for, the developmental work that produced those signs has already been happening for a long time. The signs are the result of readiness, not its beginning.
When we wait for the moment, we miss the months. The most observable milestone of early childhood is treated as the one not to teach toward, when in fact it is built exactly the way every other capability is built: through repeated, low-pressure, meaningful experience, long before performance is ever asked for.
What readiness is actually made of
Children in the years we are talking about, roughly eighteen months to three, are in what Piaget called the Preoperational Stage, defined further as the Symbolic Function Substage in that age group. They do not reason abstractly. You cannot explain to a two-year-old why using the toilet matters and expect the explanation to do any work. But they learn powerfully through three things: narrative, image, and repetition. They connect with a character. They follow a story. They begin to see themselves in it.
This is how readiness is genuinely built, through the slow accumulation of understanding:
• Body awareness: noticing the signals their own body sends, and learning that those signals have names and meanings.
• Language: having the words for what is happening, so that the experience is shared rather than private and confusing.
• Routine and predictability: knowing what happens, in what order, so the bathroom is familiar territory rather than a sudden demand.
• Emotional safety: learning, through dozens of calm interactions, that this is an ordinary part of life and not a source of anxiety or judgement.
• A sense of agency: experiencing this as something they are growing into and doing, rather than something done to them.
None of these is a switch. Every one of them is taught, modelled, and scaffolded over time, in exactly the way we already scaffold everything else. The difference is that for these capabilities, most services have no shared plan for doing so. They are left to emerge, and then we call their emergence readiness.
The developmental stakes, briefly
This matters more than comfort and convenience. The shift in when children reach this milestone is generational. In a study of more than a thousand children trained in the 1950s, over 97 per cent had completed daytime toilet learning by 36 months; in recent studies, only 40 to 60 per cent complete by the same age (Blum, Taubman and Nemeth, 2004).
The same research names what sits behind later completion: a later start, stool toileting refusal, and frequent constipation. In other words, the absence of early, intentional, low-pressure groundwork is not neutral. It is associated with the very patterns that make later toilet learning harder, and with continence difficulties that can follow children into the school years. Building readiness deliberately is about not leaving the foundations to chance.
The part we get most wrong: home and centre pulling apart
Here is where intentional readiness most often falls down, and it has nothing to do with how hard anyone is trying.
A child today spends a large share of their week in care. For many families, more days are spent at the centre than at home. That means toilet learning, more than almost any other milestone, now happens across two settings at once. And when those two settings approach it differently, the child is the one who has to absorb the difference.
Picture it from the child's side. At home, a child usually meets just one or two familiar adults. At the centre, across a single week a child may be supported by four, five or more educators, each bringing their own language, their own pacing, their own response to an accident, unless a shared approach holds them to one. None of these adults is doing anything wrong, but the child is being asked to make sense of a milestone that keeps changing shape depending on who is in the room.
Bronfenbrenner gave us the language for why this matters. A young child develops inside their immediate settings, home and centre, and just as powerfully in the connections between them. When those settings carry the same language and the same routine, the child experiences one coherent world and the developmental work compounds. When they pull apart, or when the centre alone speaks in five different voices, the child is left to bridge the gap themselves, at precisely the moment they most need predictability. That is what later shows up as anxiety, as refusal, as confusion, as delay.
We tend to treat home-centre consistency as a communication task. A form in the enrolment pack. A note on the app. A quick chat at pickup. But consistency is not a message. It is a system. It is the same language, the same response to accidents, the same understanding of refusal as a developmental signal rather than defiance, the same tools, used in the same way, in both places.
When that alignment exists, something quietly powerful happens. The child stops having to recalibrate. Every interaction, at home and at the centre, points in the same direction, and the developmental work compounds instead of competing with itself. That is what genuine partnership with families looks like in practice, and it is also, not incidentally, exactly what the National Quality Standard means when it asks for authentic family partnership rather than one-way communication.
Why dignity sits underneath all of it
Erik Erikson named this stage more than sixty years ago: autonomy versus shame and doubt. Between roughly eighteen months and three years, children are working out whether they are capable and autonomous or dependent and doubtful. Toilet learning is the most repeated, most observable activity of that stage, and the adult response in each of those moments either builds the child or quietly erodes them.
What erodes is rarely dramatic. It is small, repeated and structural: a sigh when an accident is found, a clock-watch during change time, a hurried transition, a conversation about the accident held over the child's head. When the approach is inconsistent across adults and settings, these small moments multiply, because nobody is working to the same script. When the approach is shared, calm and predictable, the child experiences the opposite: that their body, their pace, and their dignity are safe in every room they are in.
What intentional readiness looks like in a service
If readiness is built, then a service can build it deliberately. In practice that means starting long before any child is asked to perform, and it means the same approach travelling with the child between home and centre. Concretely, it looks like:
• Normalising bodies and toileting as an ordinary, everyday part of life, through story and symbolic play, long before a child sits on a toilet.
• A physical environment where the bathroom feels safe, familiar and child-scaled rather than clinical or hurried.
• Shared language across every educator in every room, relief and casual staff included, so a child never has to recalibrate to a new adult's style.
• Recognition that builds genuine, internal motivation, supporting a child's growing competence and autonomy.
• A response to accidents and to refusal that is identical across the team, and understood as developmental signal rather than behaviour to be corrected.
• A real bridge into the home, so families have the same language, the same tools and the same approach, and the child meets one consistent experience rather than two competing ones.
This is the work that turns waiting into teaching. It is also, for most services, the missing piece, because the sector has never given them a shared framework for this one milestone the way it has for every other.
The framework built for exactly this
This is the gap Go Time–Potty Time Early Learning was built to close. It is a whole-centre, embedded approach to toilet learning that treats readiness as something developed through learning, and treats home-centre alignment as a designed system rather than a policy to meet.
It begins with a storybook that normalises toileting through narrative and character, in the mode toddlers actually learn through. It builds understanding through visual supports at child eye level, progress tools grounded in competence and autonomy, and sensory and play-based engagement that meets each child at their individual stage. It trains every educator, across relief, room and leadership tiers, so the quality of the moment does not depend on who is rostered. And it extends into the home through a pack containing the very same tools used at the centre, along with education and resources for families, so the approach a child meets at the service and the approach they meet at home are, finally, the same approach.
Intentional. Meaningful. Consistent. Connected. Built, not waited for.
A question to sit with
Children deserve to grow into this milestone the way they grow into everything else we care about: through learning, with dignity, supported by adults who share a plan and a language across every room and every home a child moves between.
So a question for leaders, what are you doing, deliberately, intentionally and together, to build that readiness, and does the child meet the same answer wherever they are?
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.