The only early childhood milestone that waits for the adults, not the child.

In early childhood education and care, no other developmental milestone works this way. Children are taught to communicate, to regulate, to count, to climb, to wash their hands. Nobody waits for a family to initiate emotional regulation before an educator supports it. Toilet learning is the exception. Across most of the sector, services wait for families to initiate, and children who are developmentally ready wait for the adults around them.

The waiting is usually explained by readiness. Parents hold off until a child shows the signs, and services hold off until parents begin. The difficulty is that nobody has ever agreed what those signs are. A review of the readiness literature by Kaerts and colleagues found no consensus on which signs, or how many of them, indicate that a child is ready to begin. Readiness is treated as a state that arrives on its own, when it is closer to a set of capabilities that develop over time through the same nurturing and support every other area of learning receives.

The families the sector waits for are largely not working from readiness either. In a Belgian survey of more than 800 parents, one of the few studies to ask parents directly why they started, 50 per cent began toilet training because their child needed to be ready for kindergarten, and a further 39 per cent started because of the child's age. Less than three in ten parents started because their child showed signs of being ready. The authors note that when the decision rests on external factors rather than the child, the start is often poorly timed.

So a service waits for the family, some families wait for readiness, and readiness has no agreed definition. Most start because preschool is approaching, or when the child reaches a certain age. The child in the developmental window waits through all of it.

Services waiting for families made complete sense once. In 1996, only around a quarter of Australian children under five attended formal care, and even by 2005 around half of those attending did so for under ten hours a week. Toilet learning mostly happened at home, with a parent, across weeks of ordinary repetition. A service supporting what a family led was the right model for that world, because the family home was where the learning was actually taking place.

Today, among children in the toilet learning window, 66.2 per cent of two and three year olds attend approved care, and those in centre-based care average 34.1 hours a week. For a great many children, the toilet learning years are spent predominantly in a service.

The arrangement stayed the same while the setting shifted underneath it.

What the delay looks like

The shift in where children spend their days has run alongside a generational shift in when toilet learning happens. In the mid-twentieth century, around 97 per cent of children had completed daytime toilet training by 36 months. By 2010, the comparable Australian figure was 51 per cent. Within two generations, the proportion of children reaching one of the most significant self-care milestones of early childhood has halved.

The delay carries health consequences. A meta-analysis of ten studies involving more than 24,000 children found that later toilet training is associated with higher rates of lower urinary tract dysfunction, including daytime wetting and overactive bladder. A prospective cohort study found that beginning toilet learning after 24 months is associated with persistent daytime wetting at school age. Stool withholding becomes markedly more common in older children and is associated with chronic constipation, a cycle that is genuinely difficult to interrupt once established.

The Continence Foundation of Australia has put the problem to the government twice. Its 2023 submission to the Commonwealth Early Years Strategy called for training for early childhood education and care workers, investment in service capacity, and counting of children who start school still in nappies.

That submission is direct about the prevailing default. The Foundation observes that current early childhood health and development practice encourages parents to wait for a child to demonstrate readiness, which has produced what it calls "a wait and see approach to childhood incontinence", resting on the expectation that most children will get there in their own time. Later commencement of toilet training, the Foundation notes, may have detrimental effects on children.

The Foundation returned to the issue in its 2024 policy position paper, Beyond 'Wait and See'. Its assessment of the landscape is blunt. There are few guidelines and limited sources of support for early years services, and families are left managing delayed bladder and bowel control case by case when a strategic, evidence-based approach is what the situation calls for.

The policy system is now moving toward exactly this window. The Centre for Policy Development's Healthy Starts report maps how family engagement with developmental monitoring fragments beyond the newborn period, and notes the reform direction across early childhood policy: from treatment to prevention, and from specialist care outside everyday settings to earlier support in the places where children live, learn and build relationships. The 2026-27 Federal Budget funds a new Medicare three-year-old health assessment from November this year, an idea the Continence Foundation had called for with independent toileting named in the assessment. The health system is building its checkpoint at three. The everyday setting where many three-year-olds spend their weeks has no documented practice waiting on the other side of it.

The milestone is already in the frameworks

Here is what makes the current arrangement strange rather than merely dated. Toilet learning is not missing from Australia's early childhood architecture. It is named there.

The Australian Education Research Organisation's Early Childhood Learning Trajectories place toilet learning within the physical development trajectory, in the physical health and self-care subdomain, as a capability that develops across the early years and that educators can observe and support. A national evidence body has mapped it as learning.

The Early Years Learning Framework defines curriculum as all the interactions, experiences, activities, routines and events, planned and unplanned, that occur in an environment designed to foster children's learning, development and wellbeing. It goes further than that. The framework's own list of routines names nappy change and toileting directly, and states that routines are a key component of the curriculum. Every nappy change, every trip to the bathroom, every accident response is already curriculum, by the framework's definition. The only question is whether it is taught intentionally. 

At school entry, the Australian Early Development Census measures developmental vulnerability across five domains. In 2024, 23.5 per cent of Australian children were developmentally vulnerable on one or more domains, and vulnerability in the physical health and wellbeing domain, the domain within which toileting independence is measured, has progressively increased across every collection since 2009. 

So the milestone is named in the national learning trajectories, captured by the sector's own definition of curriculum, and shadowed by a school-entry measure heading the wrong way. What is missing is the layer in between: documented, intentional practice.

What intentional practice would look like

Most services have no documented approach to toilet learning. It rarely appears in the planning cycle the way language, numeracy or social development do. Educators support one of the most significant developmental transitions of the early years without a method, without training, and without shared language across the room.

That is not a reflection of educators. The sector has never treated toilet learning as teaching, so it has never trained anyone to teach it.

Intentional practice in this space is describable, and none of it is exotic. For the child, it looks like building interoception, a child's awareness of their own body signals, well before independence is expected of them. It looks like teaching the steps of toileting as a sequence, the way any other skill is scaffolded, rather than assuming a child who can use a toilet knows how to recognise the signal, get there, manage clothing and finish the task. It looks like doing that through play and story, in language a two-year-old can actually understand, because that is how every other concept reaches children this age. It looks like recognising progress in a way that builds autonomy and competence, and having considered responses ready for refusal, avoidance and regression, which are ordinary parts of the process rather than signs that something has gone wrong.

For the educator team, it looks like one method across the whole service. It looks like a shame-protective accident response that every educator uses the same way, so a child's experience does not depend on who is on shift. It looks like professional development that reaches relief and casual staff as well as permanent educators, because consistency collapses at exactly the point a service is most stretched. It looks like leadership is treating this as their business, with the practice documented in the planning cycle and able to be evidenced against the frameworks a service is already assessed against.

For families, it looks like a direct, consistent connection into the home, so the child experiences one coherent journey rather than two contradictory ones. It looks like families receive the same information the educators have, since nobody can support an approach that has not been explained to them. It looks like a defined pathway to occupational therapy when a child needs more than a service can offer, triggered early rather than after difficulties have entrenched.

Every one of those elements already exists somewhere in the sector's practice for other domains. Toilet learning is simply the domain that never received them.

Children spend their days in our services during the exact years this milestone is meant to be reached. The question for the sector is no longer whether toilet learning belongs in intentional practice. The frameworks have answered that. The question is how long children keep waiting for the adults around them to catch up.

Children deserve to have this milestone taught with the same intention as everything else they learn.

Author

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. Based in Adelaide, Monica writes and speaks on early childhood development, educator workload, and the milestones the sector has yet to resource. She is a passionate advocate for children’s agency and dignity in early learning.

References

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Australian Education Research Organisation. (2023, updated 2026). Early Childhood Learning Trajectories: Physical development. AERO. edresearch.edu.au

Australian Government Department of Education. (2022). Belonging, Being and Becoming: The Early Years Learning Framework for Australia V2.0. Australian Government.

Australian Government. (2025). Australian Early Development Census National Report 2024. Department of Education.

Brazelton, T. B. (1962). A child-oriented approach to toilet training. Pediatrics, 29(1), 121-128.

Centre for Policy Development. (2026). Healthy Starts: The state of Australia's child and family health service system. Centre for Policy Development.

Christie, A. (2010). Toilet training of infants and children in Australia: 2010. The Restraint Project, School of Public Health and Community Medicine, University of New South Wales.

Continence Foundation of Australia. (2023). Submission to the Commonwealth Early Years Strategy. Continence Foundation of Australia.

Continence Foundation of Australia. (2024). Beyond 'Wait and See': Tackling Childhood Incontinence. Policy Position Paper, May 2024.

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 & Behavioral Pediatrics, 30(5), 385-393.

Kaerts, N., Van Hal, G., Vermandel, A., & Wyndaele, J. J. (2012). Readiness signs used to define the proper moment to start toilet training: a review of the literature. Neurourology and Urodynamics, 31(4), 437-440.

Li, X., et al. (2020). Delayed toilet training association with pediatric lower urinary tract dysfunction: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Journal of Pediatric Urology, 16(3), 352.e1-352.e8.

Productivity Commission. (2026). Report on Government Services 2026: Early childhood education and care. Australian Government.

Van Aggelpoel, T., De Wachter, S., Van Hal, G., Van der Cruyssen, K., Neels, H., & Vermandel, A. (2018). Parents' views on toilet training: a cross-sectional study in Flanders. Nursing Children and Young People.