Elimination Communication

Came across this term recently in an article under parenting tips… Being a father of a 6 Month old toddler daughter I have started to read these sections after a gap of 6 long years after my first daughter was born. My first thought was, what’s a management article doing in the parenting section of a newspaper. I then told myself that it must be one of those articles on Effective Communication or Corporate communication or the likes and I even interpreted it as a softer way of communicating an inevitable retrenchment during these times of recession.

Surprise!!! Surprise!!! As I read along I realised Elimination Communication or EC was nothing but the strange noises and faces you and your forefathers or in this case foremothers made just to empty your bowels and bladders when you were a toddler. The ‘ssssssssh’ and the ‘pisssssss’ are actually what today is called Elimination Communication …ELIMINATION COMMUNICATION actually sounds better than ssssssh. Well Im not getting into the nuances of EC, briefly they use Parental instincts, facial and bowel contortions to figure out when your toddler needs to let it go sans a diaper …

These are days when even an act as normal as a cuddle or a hug is termed ‘Parental Bonding’ so why shouldn’t potty training or toilet training assume such euphemistic terminologies.

This article came at a time when the inflation was directly proportional to the number of diapers used, and I wouldn’t mind to spend a couple of hundreds of dollars to do a crash course on Elimination Communication to eliminate the dreaded diapers out of my weekly ( or is it hourly) shopping list. God save P & G once I have mastered the art of EC.

So folks you would find an additional qualification listed on my CV and my Linkdin pages soon… Post Graduate Diploma in Elimination Communication…Guess Stephen Covey would soon include this as the 8th habit of highly effective people.