Some may call comedian Katherine Ryan unconventional – but her parenting techniques could be the envy of us all.
This is the woman who, as a young mother at 25, was breaking into comedy and took her then four-week-old daughter Violet to gigs with her, potty-training her at least a year before most of us even start.
Today, Ryan, 38, has two children – Violet, 12 (from a previous relationship) and eight-month-old Fred, with her husband, Bobby Kootstra.
She recently shared on her Instagram stories how she’s trying the same early potty training technique with her youngest chid. She posted: “I hate to even write this because I know I’ll get backlash but…
“Fred reliably wees on the potty at under 8 months and we can count the amount of 2022 soiled nappies on one hand. I didn’t know whether it would work with Fred. It does. Potty train babies before they learn to go in nappies!!! They can do it!”
Here, she describes some of her more unconventional parenting skills, as charted in her new memoir, The Audacity…
How did you get Violet out of nappies when she was just 10-months-old?
“I was definitely uneducated, inexperienced and unconventional. I just parented by intuition alone. I considered her thoughts a lot. I imagined I would feel very vulnerable to have someone else change my nappy – I wouldn’t like it. I thought, let’s just teach her not to go (in a nappy).
“If you wait a little longer, children have been trained to go in their pants and they get used to nappies. Violet was really headstrong, even as an infant. I thought, ‘She’s switched on’.
“I had the luxury of being at home or near my daughter 24/7, so as soon as she started on solid foods, I could tell by the look on her face if she needed the toilet and quickly whipped off her nappy to hold her over the potty,” she continues.
Ryan would sit Violet on the potty to read her a story first thing in the morning, which usually resulted in a wee, and do the same hourly and always before bed.
You also adopted ‘attachment parenting’ – what does that mean?
“Yes. I carried her with me everywhere. She was held for most of the day, every day,” Ryan says of when her daughter was little. “It’s a philosophy based on empathy, responsiveness, closeness and touch.”
Did you also sign with her as a baby?
“Yeah, a lot of people are doing that now. My mother always told me that babies know what you are saying but because of their brain development, they can’t yet form sounds with the muscles in their mouth.
“But they can sign from about seven months and they will sign anything that’s …….