Teaching Your Child to Wipe

My daughter pats the front dry and I still wipe the back...she is four and it just doesn't get clean w/out some help.

My six year old son still needs help sometimes...I hate finding poop on the ends of his long sleeve shirts...ugh, so gross.

I never realized how long you deal with poop when you have kids...

With little kids their arms are so short they have trouble reaching around to the butt area, even with the tilting method or the squatting method. Their physiology just isn't right for learning how to wipe "correctly" in my personal experience so I've taught my daughter to carefully wipe her front when she pees, which she's totally able to do but we're still working on wiping from the back when she poops, which is still a struggle. She's very proud that she can take care of herself fine when she just has a pee but when she poops she will wipe to practice but I always have to come in and follow up because she's just physically incapable of doing a good job right now.

She knows not to go too far back when cleaning her front or she'll get butt stuff in her front and that's not good. She understands what getting sick is and that if she wipes wrong she can get sick but until she can reach back there easier, everything we're doing is just practice until she can grow into it.

I taught my daughter to pat her front dry, throw the paper away, then wipe up the back. When she was four almost five, I showed her how to do it the "grown-up" way.

I've never wiped front to back.

I don't want my arm getting messy / don't want to wash to my elbows (and notice no one else does, either!!!)

I wipe front, then I reach around and wipe the back.

I dab! I was never taught the rule and when i was 19 someone told me about this! It was hard for me to break my long habbit so now i fold up my toliet paper (usualy three squares folded to make a rectangle) and just blot or dab the toliet paper to get the job done. Hope this was not tmi and it helps. I wonder if its ok to just dab????