Have we ever used litter boxes for human babies?

May 13, 2013 4:58 AM

Google and an academic journal search are failing my sudden curiosity on litter boxes and human babies. I have both at home, and have read a lot for work about the history of sanitation and options (plumbing and diapers are awesome) but in all the sheer variety, I can't remember ever coming across an example of a litter box system for small children. I know with pits you would throw soil on top to cover the waste but these were notoriously bad places for little children because they could fall in. Yet, watching my cats and trying to stop the toddler from playing there, it seems like an eminently sensible option to have a box of clean sand around for a small infant to use. Does anyone know if this existed or exists now? Not as a single quirky practice, but as a cultural norm?
posted by viggorlijah to Society & Culture (12 answers total)

Not a parent, but I am a cat owner. It seems to me you would still have to littler train the baby. Which is pretty much like potty training. Also, as I understand it, the crux of potty training is elimination control, which each kid sort of develops at his own pace. Until a kid understands when he or she has to go, and can hold it for short periods of time, then neither a potty or a litter box is going to be much use.
posted by kimdog at 5:11 AM on May 13, 2013

As stated above, it isn't the method/environment, it is the ability to control. There are cultures where elimination is simply going to the side of the road, taking a squat and doing the job. However, babies go when they go, and, and, if the product is accessible when they are done, they would play with it.

Bad idea, but it you give it a go, be sure to let us know how it works for ya...
posted by HuronBob at 5:30 AM on May 13, 2013

[Note: OP is asking if anyone knows of documented use of sand/litter boxes for human infants, not so much if it's a good idea, or if s/he should do it.]
posted by taz at 5:37 AM on May 13, 2013

I think the answer depends on whether you count everyone using the same chamber pot or hole in the ground. If the answer is "No," then I don't think this ever happened. Infants poop in their diapers--or whatever--and you basically just clean up after them as needed. But once they start being capable of taking care of their own business, they go wherever everyone else goes, whatever that might be. Indoor toilet, chamber pot, outhouse, ditch on the side of the road, or just squatting wherever. I have friends currently living in central China where toilet facilities are generally somewhere between "There's a shack we've built over that hole" and "Dude, just go outside," and there are no reports of provision being made for any step between the way infants and adults do things.
posted by valkyryn at 5:47 AM on May 13, 2013

To build on Valkryn's post, you can train an infant to pee and poop pretty much anywhere, so I suppose a litter box would be as good as any place.

I heard a story about this on NPR, and apparently, it's a thing.

The only thing with infants though, is the ability to get to the litter box specifically to pee or poop. Since the ability to be mobile, the ability to get the pants or whatever off and to then arrange one's self to eliminate are all pretty sophisticated, I think it would be beyond a kid's motor skills.

But you can be one of the "bare bottomed" societies, and you've removed a significan barrier to litter box training. Of course, cats don't have folds of skin around their butts, and they're not too picky about licking themselves clean. I doubt seriously you'd want to encourage an infant to do so.

Of course, by the time you've trained a kid to pee in the cat box, it's just as easy to teach him to pee in a potty.
posted by Ruthless Bunny at 5:59 AM on May 13, 2013

it seems like an eminently sensible option to have a box of clean sand around for a small infant to use

It's not, really. In the animal kingdom, human newborns are among the most helpless. It takes months for a human infant to be even be able to move from one place to another on their own. You've got to overcome the cognitive challenge of getting them to understand what you want them to do, and then you've got to overcome the fact that they can't do it even if they want to.

[Taz: The OP's question seems based on faulty postulates; I think it's valid to address that.]
posted by DWRoelands at 6:03 AM on May 13, 2013

The problem with sand for a baby, is that they would put a lot of it in their mouths, which is bad whether or not it is clean (which, as a cat owner, I can promise that a litter pan never truly is). I guess you could try the sort of artificial grass pads used for "litter training" dogs though, to get around that.

In China very young children are often put in pants with a big central gap, so you can just dangle them over the bushes when they start to do their business, but that's still more about outdoor business than indoor. I think you gain nothing by having a specified indoor spot unless the baby can get there, which, as already mentioned, is still a challenge with many 3-year-olds...
posted by acm at 6:11 AM on May 13, 2013

Cats and dogs can also clean themselves efficiently after urinating/defecating. Babies not so much.
posted by judith at 6:38 AM on May 13, 2013

Cats are born with an instinct to paw at sand or dirt after elimination and cover their urine and feces. This has an evolutionary advantage of hiding their odors and therefore location from enemies or potential prey. A kitten is easily litter-box trained by simply holding its little paws and making a cyclical motion in the litter -- they will instinctively know what that means. Humans have no such instinct -- even if a barebottomed baby were somehow trained to use "a box of clean sand", the feces would sit on top forever. No evolutionary advantage to that.

Another issue with human infants is that breastfeeding (which in non-Western cultures is often for 3 or more years) produces very loose stools, completely unsuited for deposit in an indoor sandbox.

I therefore doubt that any cultures have attempted a litter-box model for their young children.
posted by RRgal at 6:47 AM on May 13, 2013

Not quite a litter box, but in Nicholas Day's Baby Meets World, he notes that there's at least one culture (Mongolian nomads?) that stuffed newborns into sandbags, so that they would have something absorbent to eliminate into. The baby would spend most of their time for the first six months in these sorts of bags.

There's a snippet available on Google Books that hints at this. Not quite a litter box, but more of using sand (because you have tons of dry sand around) instead of a diaper for sleeping when the baby is pappoosed.
posted by chengjih at 7:15 AM on May 13, 2013

Thanks Chengjih! Sandbagging comes very close - provinces in Northern China where there are water shortages had for a long time the traditional practice of leaving babies in bags of sand that acted as diapers/swaddles. The practice was actively discouraged from the 1990s because of the severe delays of the children, and I can find no photographs or more recent mentions of it, I suspect more because of the One Child policy and economic advancement creating a better child:caretaker ratio. (More on sandbaggining at this newspaper report from 1990s and World Bank Report on child development in China from 1999.
posted by viggorlijah at 9:46 AM on May 13, 2013

On the island where I do my fieldwork, people carry white sand from the beach and spread it around the outside of their houses. It's mainly for aesthetics, but also works like a giant litter box in practice: little kids just pull down their pants and pee wherever, and their parents kick sand over it. I didn't notice kids pooping on the sand, though.

This island is in the Cook Islands, but I bet it's a fairly widespread practice on sandy atolls.
posted by lollusc at 5:10 PM on May 13, 2013