A question I am asked regularly by curriculum leaders and educators when they first encounter Go Time–Potty Time Early Learning is whether it is an educational program or a clinical one.
The answer is that it has to be both. The milestone it addresses sits at the exact intersection of three disciplines: early childhood pedagogy, developmental psychology, and clinical health practice. Treating it as any one of those in isolation produces a program that is incomplete. Treating it as all three, in an integrated and coherent way, produces something the Australian early childhood sector has not had before.
This article explains how those three disciplines come together in the program’s design, and why the intersection matters for children, educators, and families.
The pedagogical foundation
Go Time–Potty Time Early Learning is, first and foremost, an early childhood education program. Its design is grounded in the pedagogical principles that underpin quality early learning practice in Australia: intentional teaching, responsive scaffolding, child-directed learning, and the primacy of play and story as vehicles for development.
The Early Years Learning Framework V2.0 describes children as competent and capable learners with rights and agency. The National Quality Standard Quality Area 1 requires intentional teaching, responsive scaffolding, and environments in which each child’s agency is promoted. Go Time–Potty Time meets all three NQS elements directly, and was designed to be compatible across the major early childhood frameworks practised in Australia and internationally, including Reggio Emilia, Montessori, Waldorf, Te Whāriki, HighScope, EYFS, Pikler, and Forest School approaches. Compatibility was a deliberate design choice, because a milestone this universal requires a program that works inside the pedagogical identity each centre has been built around.
But the pedagogical grounding goes deeper than framework alignment.
Jean Piaget’s work on the preoperational stage establishes that children aged approximately 2 to 7 years cannot engage with abstract reasoning or deferred incentives. Their cognition is immediate, concrete, and symbolic. They learn through narrative, sensory experience, and play, not through logic, instruction, or long-term goal-setting. This is why the program is story-led. The storybook is the epistemological entry point: the mode through which learning actually occurs for children in this developmental window.
Lev Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development adds the scaffolding dimension. The space between what a child can do independently and what they can achieve with skilled adult support is where development happens. The Quest system is structured around this principle, with each step calibrated to extend the child’s emerging capability through skilled adult support. Visual routine elements externalise the multi-step toileting sequence until it is internalised as habit. The graduation certificate marks the formal closure of the ZPD: what once required external support is now independently owned.
The developmental psychology layer
Erik Erikson’s psychosocial stage model adds the dimension that makes the program’s emotional architecture so important.
The Autonomy versus Shame and Doubt stage, approximately 18 months to 3 years, is precisely the developmental window of toilet learning. Children in this stage are working out a fundamental question about themselves: am I capable, or am I doubtful of my own abilities? Erikson identified toilet learning as a defining developmental task of this stage. Children who are supported toward genuine self-control with patient, consistent, skilled adult guidance resolve this stage toward autonomy. Children who experience shame, pressure, or withdrawal of adult approval resolve it toward doubt.
This is not an abstract psychological theory. Shame-protection design is a thread running through every element of the program, from the language frameworks educators use, to the way accidents are responded to, to the way progress is made visible to the child.
Attachment Theory, building on Bowlby and Ainsworth, adds a further layer. Children only take developmental risks from a secure base. During the hours a child spends in care, the educator functions as a secondary attachment figure, and the security of that relationship determines whether the child has the emotional resources to engage with a milestone as significant as toilet learning. Responsive interaction protocols across the program are designed to protect those attachment relationships through moments that, handled poorly, could rupture them.
Self-Determination Theory, developed by Deci and Ryan, adds the motivational dimension. SDT describes motivation as a continuum, from external regulation through introjected, identified, and integrated regulation, to genuine intrinsic motivation. The developmental task in toilet learning is not to skip the continuum but to begin at the appropriate point for the child’s stage and to design the program so that it naturally moves the child along it.
Cognitive Evaluation Theory adds a critical nuance. Deci, Koestner and Ryan’s meta-analysis of 128 experiments established that not all external supports undermine intrinsic motivation. Unexpected, non-contingent acknowledgements focused on competence rather than compliance do not undermine motivation, they build it. The program’s progress and celebration elements are designed precisely on that evidence base.
Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological Systems Theory connects all of this to the question that defines the program’s whole-centre design: the relationship between home and centre. Bronfenbrenner described development as occurring within nested systems, and identified the mesosystem, the connection between a child’s microsystems, as exerting some of the most powerful developmental influence of all. For a child spending roughly four days a week in care, alignment between those two environments is not a nice-to-have. It is the developmental architecture itself. Go Time–Potty Time was built to align the home and centre microsystems through shared language, shared visual cues, shared acknowledgement, and shared parent education, so that the child experiences one coherent journey rather than two contradictory ones.
The clinical application
The third discipline that shapes the program is clinical health practice: paediatric continence science, occupational therapy, and the clinical guidance that governs how toilet learning is managed when it becomes a health concern.
The clinical dimension begins with the health stakes of delayed toilet learning. It is well established in the research that delayed toilet learning is associated with bladder and bowel dysfunction, and with social, emotional, executive function, and school readiness impacts that extend well beyond the toileting milestone itself. A meta-analysis of ten studies involving 24,121 children found that earlier toilet training is significantly associated with lower rates of bladder problems including daytime wetting, overactive bladder, and persistent bedwetting. A prospective study found that initiating toilet training after 24 months is linked to higher rates of daytime wetting and bladder control difficulties at school age. Stool withholding and stool toileting refusal are common contributors to chronic constipation and encopresis, a cycle that is genuinely difficult to break once established.
These are health outcomes with long-term consequences, and the clinical frameworks that govern this space reflect that seriousness. The International Children's Continence Society sets the global terminology and diagnostic standards for paediatric bladder conditions, including enuresis and daytime incontinence. The Rome IV criteria, published by the Rome Foundation, provide the equivalent global framework for paediatric functional bowel conditions, including functional constipation, faecal incontinence, and encopresis. NICE guidelines in the UK establish best practice for paediatric continence care. The clinical concept of bladder-bowel dysfunction (BBD) recognises that bladder and bowel issues are clinically interlinked and need to be understood together. Go Time–Potty Time is designed with awareness of all of these, and provides a structured, OT-informed escalation pathway for children whose toilet learning challenges exceed what a universal program can appropriately address.
Occupational therapy contributes a further layer. The American Occupational Therapy Association classifies toileting as a foundational Activity of Daily Living. Ayres Sensory Integration provides the framework for understanding how sensory processing affects the ability to perform multi-step self-care occupations like toileting. Interoception, the still-emerging science of how children become aware of internal body states such as the urge to wee, is increasingly recognised as foundational to continence development, and the program’s pacing and language are designed to support its emergence. The Quest system reflects core OT activity analysis principles: a complex multi-step skill broken into graded components, each calibrated to current capacity.
The clinical endorsement of structured, competence-focused external supports in toilet learning is explicit. Continence Health Australia, the RACGP’s Australian Family Physician, and the Royal Children’s Hospital Melbourne all recommend sticker-based progress tools and acknowledgement of effort as appropriate first-line strategies for building toileting habits. The program’s progress elements are designed in line with that clinical consensus and the Cognitive Evaluation Theory evidence base that explains why those approaches work.
The parent education component of the program is also clinically informed. Research has found that 81.9% of parents do not see later completion of toilet training as a problem. Informed families become genuine partners in the process. Uninformed ones, through no fault of their own, are working without the information they need to support their child’s health.
The intersection
What makes Go Time–Potty Time Early Learning distinctive is not any one of these disciplines. It is the way they are integrated into a coherent, whole-centre program that addresses all three simultaneously.
Pedagogy without clinical grounding produces a program that engages children beautifully but does not address the health consequences of delay or the clinical complexity. Clinical practice without pedagogical grounding produces an intervention that is appropriate for a therapy room but does not translate into the daily rhythms of a group early learning environment. Developmental psychology without either produces a program that is theoretically elegant but practically undeliverable.
The Australian early childhood sector has been managing toilet learning without any of this, improvising in a space where the stakes are high, the complexity is real, and the support has been absent.
Go Time–Potty Time Early Learning was designed to change that, by building the first integrated framework that treats this milestone with the full weight of professional knowledge it deserves: across pedagogy, psychology, and clinical practice, delivered in a way that works in the real world of early childhood care.
Children navigating one of the most significant developmental milestones of their early years deserve exactly that.
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:
Blum, N. J., Taubman, B., & Nemeth, N. (2004). Why is toilet training occurring at older ages? A study of factors associated with later training. Journal of Pediatrics, 145(1), 107 to 111.
Deci, E. L., Koestner, R., & Ryan, R. M. (1999). A meta-analytic review of experiments examining the effects of extrinsic rewards on intrinsic motivation. Psychological Bulletin, 125(6), 627 to 668.
Joinson, C., Heron, J., Von Gontard, A., Butler, U., Emond, A., & Golding, J. (2009). A prospective study of age at initiation of toilet training and subsequent daytime bladder control in school-age children. Journal of Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics, 30(5), 385 to 393.
Li, X., Guo Wen, J., et al. (2020). Delayed toilet training and its association with paediatric lower urinary tract dysfunction: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Journal of Pediatric Urology, 16(3), 352.e1 to 352.e8. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpurol.2020.02.016
van Nunen, K., Kaerts, N., Wyndaele, J. J., Vermandel, A., & Van Hal, G. (2015). Parents' views on toilet training: A quantitative study to identify the beliefs and attitudes of parents concerning toilet training. Journal of Child Health Care.
International Children's Continence Society (ICCS). Standardisation of terminology of lower urinary tract function in children and adolescents.
Rome Foundation. (2016). Rome IV criteria for functional gastrointestinal disorders.
National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE). Guidance on paediatric continence care in children and young people.
American Occupational Therapy Association (AOTA). Occupational Therapy Practice Framework: Domain and Process (toileting as an Activity of Daily Living).
Continence Health Australia. Toilet learning guidance for families and professionals.
Royal Children's Hospital Melbourne. Toilet training clinical guidance.