The Chinese have their babies wear diapers for the first four months. After four months the diaper is exchanged for underwear with a big opening for the necessary excrements. The parent or guardian blows a whistle when it is time to go potty. After a while, the baby associates the whistling with going potty, and then the order is changed. Once an hour, the baby is placed on the pot (or on the street!), and then when the parent blows the whistle, the child starts peeing.
Besides the Chinese method of potty-training children, great emphasis is put on the intellectual development of children. The Chinese believe that the stimulation of brain development in the first years of life determines the intellectual development for the rest of a persons life.
Arjan Polhuijs visited a young mother and her one and a half year old baby. The baby was capable to recite a whole list of traditional Chinese nursery rhymes. The whole house was one big school: place mats were covered with math problems, books were everywhere, and posters with Chinese characters and math covered the walls. Even watching TV was given lots of thought. The mother shared with us the Chinese wisdom that 20 minutes is the most ideal time to teach a child something: after those 20 minutes, the attention fades. Because of that, a lot of cartoons of exactly 20 minutes are offered, and every film teaches the child something different. Chinese have a tremendous drive to teach their children more and more, and they massively adapt products that help them do that.
The virtual world offers tremendous possibilities to train children. Already at this time, for example by DVD’s, but soon there will be a lot more. Even the crib becomes a learning environment so that we can teach our children how to survive in our world from the day they are born.