How do you teach a toddler to wipe their bum?

July 15, 2022 6:56 AM

Kiddo is toilet trained but doesn't get how to wipe his bum.

How on earth do you teach this to a 3 year old? Especially after soft poops.
Must use dry toilet paper only, as there won't be flushable wipes at school.
Tips for teaching this life skill, please? Videos would be especially helpful.

posted by anonymous to Health & Fitness (6 answers total)

This video shows it pretty well.

Be aware that it’s pretty common for this skill to take some scaffolding/practice/parent doing a second wipe for a while.
posted by tchemgrrl at 7:20 AM on July 15, 2022 [6 favorites]

Yeah that video is pretty good. So is sitting in the bathroom some times and making sure they clean up all the butt dirt. Sounds gross probably, but way better than having to do the whole process, so it's an improvement.
posted by The_Vegetables at 7:28 AM on July 15, 2022

Put up a poster oppostie the toilet at home with steps as pictures. Explain repeatedly with no shame for accidents or forgetfulness. Lots of praise when they remember without being reminded. It's a skill some kids take years to master and some pick up super fast. I personally would not be at all worried until they hit 5+, because it is totally expected to need to remind kids for a while.
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 7:44 AM on July 15, 2022 [4 favorites]

My mother trained me how to do this by doing it for me, with entirely informational commentary, until my arsehole learned what being properly clean and dried felt like and I started wanting to be able to make it feel like that on my own.
posted by flabdablet at 9:56 AM on July 15, 2022 [1 favorite]

Busy Toddler, who I love, just did a post on this very topic.
posted by ThePinkSuperhero at 9:06 PM on July 16, 2022

That posting is a nicely fleshed out step-by-step for the method my mother used with me, except that as far as I recall we never did the her-hand-steering-my-hand thing, which is kind of physically awkward; in the transition stage between her doing all the wiping and me doing all the wiping we took turns, wipe for wipe. And when I missed a bit she'd tell me, then ask me if I thought I knew where it was, then she'd wipe it off and ask again if that was the bit I was feeling.

Main thing that makes it work is being absolutely factual at every step along the way instead of expressing any kind of squeamishness or getting hung up on the intimacy of the thing or using cutesy language to disguise the essentially practical nature of the process.
posted by flabdablet at 10:50 AM on July 17, 2022