The Wall Street Journal\u2019s page one feature today discusses the pressure on three-year olds to toilet train before entering daycare, er, \u201cpreschool.\u201d But on the plus side, baseball Commissioner Bud Selig may have discovered a new marketing opportunity:<\/p>\n
Preschool starts in September, and because of strict no-diaper rules at many schools, toilet training must end.<\/p>\n
In Overland Park, Kan., Kerri Heller has until Sept. 2 to toilet-train her 3-year-old son, Jack. Ms. Heller started training in earnest earlier this month, and says she has barely left the house since.<\/p>\n
On a Monday, she bought an egg timer and set it to ring every 30 minutes to remind Jack to use the toilet. Tuesday, her husband got a neighbor to call and impersonate Mike Sweeney, first baseman for the Kansas City Royals, and encourage Jack to keep potty training and be a \u201cgood little slugger.\u201d Jamie Walker, relief pitcher for the Detroit Tigers (aka Lance Harshbarger, her husband\u2019s office colleague), gave similar encouragement. Sammy Sosa (Ms. Heller\u2019s father) called Thursday.<\/p>\n
Jack, a big baseball fan, has bobblehead dolls of two of the players sitting on the sink in the bathroom facing the toilet. \u201cYou lose all your inhibitions with this process,\u201d says Ms. Heller, who rewards Jack for good performance with M&M\u2019s and an occasional trip to Chuck E. Cheese\u2019s. \u201cThe clock is ticking and it\u2019s really stressful.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Before I go any further, I have to question Ms. Heller\u2019s decision to repeatedly lie to her son by having people impersonate his favorite baseball players. It\u2019s one thing to engage the child in fantasy\u2014i.e., the tooth fairy or Santa Claus\u2014but it\u2019s quite another to mislead him such a manipulative manner. <\/p>\n
Then there\u2019s the toilet training instructor who ignored her own instructions:<\/p>\n
Jane Hanrahan, a mother of four who teaches a toilet-training workshop at a community center in Connecticut, discourages the use of disposable training pants. Her two-hour workshop, which she offers four times a year, draws about 20 parents each session . . . <\/p>\n
She\u2019s currently training her youngest son, Michael, who will be 3 in November. Despite her best efforts, he\u2019s resisting. She recently bribed him in the grocery store with M&M\u2019s, a tactic she strongly discourages in her workshops. \u201cI looked around to see if any of my students were in the next aisle,\u201d says Ms. Hanrahan.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Preschools have a valid reason for wanting toilet-trained children: Regulations. State health and child welfare authorities often extensively regulate the manner in which diapers must be changed, making it time- and cost-prohibitive for the preschools. The Journal adds that there are legal concerns as well, and that changing diapers \u201coften require two adults to be present . . . to prevent child abuse and forestall lawsuits.\u201d<\/p>\n
And then there\u2019s that nasty \u201csocialization\u201d problem, as Sara Anron, director of a nursery school in New York, told the Journal:<\/p>\n
[T]he school found out years ago that changing older children when some of their classmates are already toilet-trained doesn\u2019t work. \u201cIt didn\u2019t last two months,\u201d says Ms. Anron. \u201cThe other children called the untrained children \u2018babies.\u2019 \u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
The needs of an individual child are, of course, irrelevant when you\u2019re talking about any form of institutionalized care, be it a nursery school or an elementary school. This does not, however, stop parents like the above-mentioned Kerri Heller from pushing for institutionalization at the earliest possible moment: \u201cMs. Heller lined up a year-and-a-half ago at 6 a.m. to get Jack into a \u2018pre-preschool\u2019 program to help him get into the preschool he\u2019s about to attend.\u201d<\/p>\n
Toilet training strikes me as the parenting equivalent of running up too much credit card debt. For the first two-plus years of life, an infant is physiologically conditioned, via diapers, to completely ignore his elimination function. This is a fairly contemporary practice of western society. Many tribal and eastern cultures condition their infants to eliminate on cue (a practice sometimes called \u201cinfant potty training\u201d in the U.S. and Europe), much as a mother breastfeeds a baby on cue. Diapering is encouraged by the medical establishment, which developed the rationale that infants have no sphincter control whatsoever until about 18 months of age. This isn\u2019t exactly true: Infants lack voluntary sphincter control, but they can be conditioned to eliminate in tandem with a parent\u2019s direction. <\/p>\n
I compare diapering to running up credit card debt because, in essence, each diaper change puts off the physiological process of elimination training until one day the entire payment comes due\u2014with interest and late fees. Now the toddler has to be trained physiologically and psychologically to do something and, in the cases described by the Journal, to do it by an arbitrary date that bears no relation to the child\u2019s actual needs. Add to that the pressure of social conformity, and you\u2019re possibly ringing up a whole new set of debt that will be paid off later on in childhood. <\/p>\n
On a final note, I would consider the Journal story a cautionary tale on the dangers of expanding \u201cuniversal\u201d preschool mandates. Here in Washington, D.C., a city councilman once proposed lowering the mandatory schooling age to three. If such policies became widespread, it would be necessary for school boards to adopt mandatory toilet training policies\u2014No Child Left With An Dirty Behind!\u2014thus putting the government in charge of a child at potentially his most vulnerable period. I don\u2019t think American society is ready for the potential horror that would unleash.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Wall Street Journal\u2019s page one feature today discusses the pressure on three-year olds to toilet train before entering daycare, er, \u201cpreschool.\u201d But on the plus side, baseball Commissioner Bud Selig may have discovered a new marketing opportunity: Preschool starts in September, and because of strict no-diaper rules at many schools, toilet training must end. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":106,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/cobranchi.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3530"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/cobranchi.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/cobranchi.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/cobranchi.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/106"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/cobranchi.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3530"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/cobranchi.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3530\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/cobranchi.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3530"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/cobranchi.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3530"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/cobranchi.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3530"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}