Ah, yes. Potty training, toils and travails of. A subject that has no interest whatever for most, but which parents of young children can’t seem to stop talking about.

I’m in quite the situation, myself. My boy is not even two years old yet - not till September - but in certain ways he is very close to being ready for this step. He hates having his diaper changed. And today he’s begun removing his own diaper everytime he does anything in it. Everytime I turn around he’s gleefully hopping about, everything flapping for joy in the cool fresh air, with a barely wet diaper and and his pants coiled around his ankles. And he doesn’t even know the words yet that I’ll need to potty train him!

The popular wisdom right now is “wait; he’ll do it when he’s ready.” But I can’t help suspecting that this may be one of the reasons why kids are training later and later. Besides, I don’t trust popular wisdom. It’s the next thing to anarchy.

Enter my mother-in-law, who is all agog with this family who potty trained their infants and never used diapers at all. The way they did it was to sit the baby on the toilet with them, thus making it instinctive. It also involved a complex method of reading “signs” in the child’s body language, since of course a three-month-old can’t say “I hafta go”  - even if does know to let loose when held over a toilet.

Yeah…not for me, but thanks, Mom.

Next I read a triumphal story on a parenting board the other day about a four-year-old who potty trained himself “when he was ready” - that time just happening to coincide with a camping trip in which the whole family had to make regular treks to the bathroom together, because it was off-site.

And…and… I read a novel, otherwise awful, in which a sort of degraded society gets divided between those who do their business wherever they happen to be at the moment, and those who have a dedicated spot.

And it ocurred to me. The diaper, from the child’s point of view, is incidental. It’s not about diaper vs. toilet. It’s all about whether you go where you stand, or retire to a private spot. In other words, using the bathroom is a societal norm, a civilized activity. We do it because we are part of a group that does it by way of structuring our social relations.

Bingo!

All I have to do to make him see the light is to take the little rat with me…every time…oh, good grass. This is not fun at all.