Did you know that some parents never put their babies in nappies? The technique, practised throughout India and Africa is called Elimination Communication.

Here, Maggie Howell, (whose son Jo is pictured right), a practitioner of Elimination Communication explains how it's done.

Out Of Africa
One of my recollections from childhood in Africa was how odd it seemed that white children wore nappies and generally black children did not. This was later reconfirmed during my travels as an adult in India, the far East and China. How wonderful I thought for little children not to be burdened with cumbersome nappies. However in those days I did not explore it any further and was totally unaware that the mothers who carried their babies were never soiled or wet.

Many years later this came back to me when a pregnant friend told me that she was not going to use nappies on her baby. She had read a lot about the intuition a mother has with her baby in more primitive cultures and believed that all mothers had this intuition if they were in tune with their child.

As I was also pregnant at the time and hoped to nurture my baby in the most natural way possible, I was really interested to follow her progress and to learn from her. We met up a few months after her baby was born and I was stunned to witness a three month old baby not only with no nappy all day, but apparently signalling when she needed to go, being held on a potty and, surprisingly delivering the goods!

From then on I was determined to find out more and see whether this was a path my husband, Joseph, and I wanted to take. I read a lot on the web, joined an e-mail community of western mums who were practising EC (elimination communication) and thought back to my childhood. When Joseph was just 4 months we decided to give it a go. I had read enough to realise that is was perfectly natural and totally possible for all babies to communicate their elimination needs.

Page 2: 'Our 8-wk-old son can hold on to his wee and poo...'