A while ago when Juju, my two-year old daughter, was just a wee tot I perused some blog entries on potty-training and vowed that I would never blog about my own children’s potty-training woes. I vowed too soon. ‘Twas when we finally potty-trained Juju that I understood just how amazing and uplifting it was to see your baby be able to poop and pee on her own, so much so that I can’t help but make potty-training the topic of my first blog entry here.
Before you label me an overzealous alpha-mom who potty-trains her children before they turn two, an age deemed too young by many, let me say that it was not by choice. In fact, I had been dreading potty training for as long as I’ve been a member of the Palo Alto Menlo Park Parents Club. From time to time a mom would post something along the lines of “help! my toddler has been smearing poop all over the house what do I do!?” and I must admit that reading these posts made me mortally afraid of when my own time would come. The only relief came when I learned from these posts that most moms didn’t start potty-training well until the children were past two-years of age and some as old as four. I became ever mindful of where to stock up on sizes six and seven diapers to last me until that woeful but inevitable day when Juju is so old that not potty-training her would make us social outcasts.
Unfortunately for me, that day of reckoning came rudely too soon. Two months ago when we moved to Beijing, I registered Juju at the preschool in our housing complex. I asked the teacher in charge of registration what they do in terms of potty-training the kids and experienced a moment of near-panic when I was told that all children are potty-trained upon entering preschool. She didn’t say that the children are required to be potty-trained, because the fact was that all children in China, under normal circumstances, simply are already potty-trained well before they reach two years of age. It was something as inarguable as that Mr. Mao was once the chairman of China.
Every potty-training manual I had read always listed starting too early as a cardinal sin in potty-training and warned of dire consequences; usually there was also a potty-training readiness check-list. I started mentally ticking off items on the list on our trip back from the pre-school. Could take own clothes off-no; could put own clothes on-no; diaper usually dry after nap-no; interest in sitting on potty-no; bothered by wet diaper-not really; adequate attention span-definitely no. Uh oh, crappy times await!
Juju was scheduled to start preschool right after her two-year birthday, so we had two months ahead of us to get her potty-trained. I had always thought hocus-pocus people who spoke of Chinese nannies who potty-trained their children in three days and the miraculous Elimination Communication method. Was there a secret Five Day Chinese Potty-Training Method to which I was not privy? How could you possibly potty-train a child when all these authors with Ph.Ds, M.D.s and more clinical experience than you could imagine say she’s not ready? I was skeptical but had no choice if I wanted her to be able to start preschool with the rest of her class.
As it turns out, China is potty-training haven. A month before Juju turned two, she was completely potty-trained and hasn’t worn diapers during the day since. As many of you wise parents know, consistency is rule number one in potty-training, but life in the US makes it very difficult. What do you do when you are out at the park/mall/Wholefoods or zooming down highway 101 and your diaperless toddler needs to go, NOW (as it is always with a toddler), especially when it’s number two? What about when she soils the carpet right after you’ve just had it steam-cleaned last month? What if she has an accident at the park right in front of those chic Menlo Park moms you were hoping to befriend? That’s enough stress to make you want to diaper up your child until she can perform long division.
These concerns simply don’t exist in China. First of all, Chinese homes are not carpeted for the most part-it is as practical as pelting nuts to shoo away squirrels. A city such as Beijing is just too dusty for carpets; low end homes can’t afford to maintain them and high end homes usually use marble and hardwood or laminate for flooring. More importantly, Chinese people are amazingly tolerant of kids’ bodily functions. Let me demonstrate this cultural difference by an example. On our United Airlines flight from SFO to Beijing, we were able to use miles to upgrade to first class. There was a huge amount of space between our seats so my husband and I used it to change our newborn son’s diaper. After a couple of diaper changes, the stewardess asked us to use the changing table in the bathroom instead, as it might “offend other passengers”. Any parent who’s been on an airplane knows whoever designed those so called changing tables on airplane lavatories have never seen actual sized babies. How I was going to wrestle an oversized feisty three-month old male baby who just figured how to flip over on that palm-sized table in a box-sized stall on my own was not something I wanted to experiment. For the rest of the flight we engaged in covert diaper-changing operations where one of us was on the look-out while the other quickly wiped the offending bum and hid the contrabands. On a Chinese airline nobody would have bat an eye if a baby was changed out in the open as long as you didn’t hinder other passengers or leave anything behind.
To potty train Juju, all we had to do was to let her run around bottomless at home and put on a pair of underwear when we went out. After peeing on the floor a few times, she figured out on her own what it was and that with the rewards and praises afterwards, it was simply to her advantage to deposit her pee in the potty. When we went out, and she needed to go, we just pull her underwear down and she goes by the side of the road. This was true whether she was on the playground, on a dirt road in the country side, or on the most expensive real estate property in Beijing. All kids do this-public toilets are not readily available and diapers are a luxury to many Chinese families. I’ve seen many moms hold their children over trash cans to pee or poop in stores or malls; I even saw a mom holding her son over a plastic bag when he needed to go on a busy subway train. When we take Juju out, we also carry extra plastic bags instead of extra diapers. It’s a commonly accepted practice to have little kids pee or poop in public.
I thought we had bragging rights since Juju was potty-trained before she turned two, which I think is pretty early even by lofty Silicon Valley standards, until I talked to other Chinese moms. It turned out that it is not uncommon for babies to go diaperless starting the age of six months and by the time many children hit a year and half they’ve been completely potty-trained. By that I mean they can let an adult know they need to go and wait until they get to a potty or behind the bush to let go even if they can’t pull their pants up or down themselves. It is in fact very strange for a child of two not to be potty-trained. The fact that Juju still wears diapers when she goes to bed at night is a shameful fact we do not disclose to other Chinese parents.
Have things been perfectly smooth since Juju was potty-trained? No. She started having accidents (on our bed, once) randomly just a week before she was supposed to start preschool and I thought the Dark Ages were upon us once more. When she started school I accompanied her for the first three days and I was so nervous she’d have an accident that I would asked her if she needed to pee every five minutes or so, much to her annoyance. At pick ups at the end of the day I always anxiously ask her teachers if she’s had accidents. To my relief, her teachers accept that children her age will have accidents and are even better than we at dealing with her accidents. Juju has attended preschool for two weeks now and only had accidents the first week and even stopped having accidents at home.
If potty-training isn’t going well for you and your little one, perhaps a trip to China is just what you need.
No comments:
Post a Comment