The 'right' time to put the diapers away

Working mothers who have very young children might wish to savor this morsel of good news: Your absence doesn't seem to affect when your children become toilet trained. That's not all: Toddlers in single-parent households get rid of diapers faster than those in two-parent families.

These are some of the findings of a comprehensive study of contemporary toilet training conducted by researchers at the Medical College of Wisconsin in Milwaukee.

Pediatrician Timothy Schum and his colleagues studied 500 black, white, and Hispanic toddlers between the ages of 15 and 42 months at four Milwaukee-area clinics.

Dr. Schum and his team found that children who were older, nonwhite, female, and brought up by one parent completed toilet training soonest. Overall, the average age for completing the process was 35 months for girls and 39 months for boys.

The researchers found that toilet training was rarely successful in children younger than 21 months. They also found parental expectations may play a role: 50 percent of African-American parents in the study, compared with 4 percent of whites, said it was important for children to be toilet trained by age 2.

Source: The Washington Post