Lead
Every May in Japan, once the Golden Week holidays wind down, a familiar message appears in nursery newsletters and parenting magazines: Get your toilet training started before summer ends. Lighter clothing means easier changes. Laundry dries fast. No one gets cold from bare skin on a warm floor. The reasoning is tidy. So many families push off the couch between June and August, and by September a surprising number report, quietly, that things did not go as planned.
But where did this seasonal consensus come from? Does missing summer actually put a child at a disadvantage? And when a child who started in summer has not made much progress by fall — has anything truly failed?
This article works through those questions in order. The short answer: in a household with modern infrastructure, season ranks at best third or fourth among the factors that actually predict whether toilet training will go smoothly.