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Using books as part of toilet learning

A book can't produce a wee or a poo. What it can do is let a child rehearse the moment through a character, again and again, at no cost if it doesn't go right.

What picture books are good at

Books can't produce a wee or a poo any more than a parent can. What they're genuinely good at is modelling: showing a child a character going through the exact sequence — noticing the feeling, walking to the toilet, sitting down — in a low-stakes, repeatable way they can watch again and again. A recent study of shared picture-book reading found that books built around a character's experience measurably increased young children's own related behaviour, and that the effect worked through the child's growing empathy with the character. [1] That study was about kindness and sharing rather than toilet learning specifically, but the mechanism it describes — a child rehearsing a behaviour through a character before trying it themselves — is exactly what a toilet-learning story is trying to do.

Being honest about the evidence

We haven't found a trial that tests picture books specifically as a toilet-training tool, and we won't claim one exists. What we do know, from decades of research on shared reading more broadly, is that reading aloud with a young child supports language development, attention, and the parent-child relationship that so much early learning rides on. [2] A book is a supporting habit, not a method on its own — it works alongside routine and praise, not instead of them.

How we used this while writing these two books

Moo's story praises noticing rather than outcome, because that's the part guidance says is worth reinforcing. [3] Bo's story is built as call-and-response rather than told-to, because a child who answers out loud is rehearsing the idea, not just hearing it — and it's built around silly wrong answers first, so there's something playful to react to before the real, possibly more loaded, question arrives.

A few ways to get more out of reading them together

Read the story for the first time somewhere calm and ordinary — the sofa, bed, anywhere that isn't the toilet itself — so a child meets it before they're ever asked to act on it. After that first read, though, a familiar copy of the book is a genuinely good thing to have on hand during sitting time, not something to keep away from it. Sitting without pressure for longer is exactly what helps, and a story a child already knows well gives them something calm to focus on while their body does its own thing — it's the same logic behind taking the pressure off "producing" and praising the sitting itself. [4] Let a child answer the questions in their own words even if they don't match the book. Repeating the refrain outside of story time — in the car, at bath time — tends to do more than reading the whole book more often.

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