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In France, parents of young children are faced with a paradox: on the one hand, the school institution requires children to be toilet trained before starting pre-school at the age of three; on the other hand, parents are expected to respect their child’s individual “pace” by avoiding forcing him or her to stop wearing diapers (a standard promoted by pediatricians and early childhood professionals). How families manage this contradiction? This article investigates these contradictory institutional guidelines and studies how parents make up with them, drawing upon a corpus of interviews with parents (mainly mothers) from different socio-professional backgrounds, as well as upon a field study carried out in a nursery school. Several educational standpoints (“activist”, “pragmatic”, “serene anticipation”, “anxious anticipation”) will be examined in order to describe various ways of dealing with these requirements.