Parenting in 2026 can sometimes feel like a nauseating all-you-can-eat competition. Without a traditional ‘village’ to turn to, you consume a dizzying glut of conflicting information online, trying to digest what is actually useful amongst the bloat of opinions on social media.
It would be lovely if we could trust parents to do what is intuitively right for their child, but given that primary school teachers are now wasting an hour a day changing children’s nappies, then clearly some intervention and guidance is needed
My first year of parenting I spent far too many hours fretting on Mumsnet forums and scrolling through Facebook scraps in which mums disagreed on everything from bottle-feeding to baby-wearing. It left me with more questions than answers: for example, should I try letting my child ‘cry it out’ (as many parents did in the 90s) for the hopes of a good night’s sleep, or will I emotionally damage them forever? Official guidance says that bed sharing goes against safe sleeping advice, so why is my Instagram feed full of influencers telling me that babies are biologically wired to want to be physically close to caregivers? Parents are told categorically not to start solids before six months, but isn’t this one reason why allergies are on the rise?
It can be hard to trust your instincts and resist the urge to neurotically follow online trends, especially when there are so many iPhone child psychologists desperate to drum up engagement by preying on parents’ insecurities and lack of generational, hand-me-down advice.
This is why I believe that government toilet-training programmes, far from being nanny-state interference, may actually be a good thing, because they provide clarity. A recent pilot scheme in York has yielded encouraging results: a combination of potty-training guides, parental workshops and special training for early years staff has reduced the number of children starting school not fully potty-trained by 43 per cent. Twenty other local authorities have now committed to using York’s model, and the government hopes that this will help them to meet their target of 75 per cent of pupils reaching a good level of development at the end of reception by 2028.
Teaching parents how to potty-train their children may well seem like state over-reach. Yet clearly something is going very wrong: according to primary school teachers, one in four reception students are not toilet trained, more than a third cannot dress themselves, and half cannot sit still. Children are missing a range of developmental milestones, with a quarter of school-starters unable to communicate their basic needs or eat and drink independently.
I have written before about the role of screen addiction here, both for toddlers and grown-ups, who are all too willing to use TVs, tablets and phones as surrogate ‘squarents’. I have also written about the pressures on working parents: since 2020, the most common arrangement for families has been both parents working full-time. If children are at childcare more waking hours than they are at home then this adds an obvious, although not insurmountable, logistical challenge to toilet-training (one survey reported that over half of parents had delayed potty-training due to both parents being busy).
There is another, less-talked about factor at play here: a lot of advice around toilet-training is well-meaning but wildly misleading. Much like with ‘gentle parenting’, a ‘child-centered approach’ has become fashionable, meaning that parents want to ‘follow their child’s lead’ and wait until they show ‘signs of readiness’. Many parents are worried about ‘traumatising’ their child if they take away nappies too early, or are told that if they wait then the child will simply potty-train themselves.
A child-led approach may have worked well when children were wearing washable nappies, but modern-day disposables or ‘pull-ups’ are so successfully absorbent that there is simply no sensory feedback. In other words, many children simply do not feel the necessary physical discomfort from wet or dirty nappies that motivates them to want to stop wearing them.
Health visitors (if you are lucky enough to see one – their numbers have declined by 41 per cent since 2015) do not offer much clarity on the issue either: one told me categorically not to try before my son was two, and warned me that boys were harder to teach and so it was better to wait – even though anecdotally I know plenty of boys where this hasn’t been the case. Potty-training can be very straightforward, but it can also be messy, time-consuming and testing, and so giving parents an excuse to delay – and eventually abdicate responsibility for it altogether – seems unwise.
It would be lovely if we could trust parents to do what is intuitively right for their child, but given that primary school teachers are now wasting an hour a day changing children’s nappies, then clearly some intervention and guidance is needed. Before 2010, school and childcare settings were allowed to require children from the age of two and a half to be out of nappies before starting. Yet the loss of this stipulation has left too many parents without a sense of urgency or direction, and all too vulnerable to voices online emphasising the importance of ‘emotional readiness.’ Centralised guidance might feel like force-feeding, but parents are hungry for clarity.
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