written on September 23, 2014
Even with all of this transplant and apartment stuff going on, my mornings this week are being spent going to daycare with my son to help him use the potty in his new classroom. Turns out the school he’s in won’t let kids into the 3-year old classes until they’re potty trained and my son is almost there. He gets a little too focused on things sometimes and forgets to tell someone when he needs to go. So I’m going to school with him to hold his hand as it were and make sure he doesn’t have any accidents. Yesterday went great – he made it through the entire day wearing big boy underwear without any accidents at all. Let’s see if he can do it again today.
It’s an interesting dilemma as far as I’m concerned. On one hand, I love the fact that we’re essentially forcing him to do something that he’s clearly ready and able to do but just hasn’t been doing, i.e. using the potty. But on the other hand, he’s been fighting against it pretty hard, which means either A) he hasn’t really been ready or B) he likes being lazy and just going whenever and wherever he wants. Is it right to force kids to do something they might not be ready to do? I kind of feel like no, it’s not, and yet holding him back a class because of it bothers me. He’s missed three weeks of the new curriculum (which means alphabet learning) because he was held back due to his continued use of diapers. I know, it’s preschool, so anything he missed learning he’s going to see again in kindergarten anyway. But still, it’s the principle of the thing. I can see how this becomes a problem in kindergarten or first grade when kids get held back because they can’t read (or because of some other basic function that they don't quite grasp). As they get held back, they lose friends and start to feel like an outsider. And who knows where that leads someone mentally – probably not too many good places.
Everything really does start in childhood. Our perceptions of who we are, how others see us, how others treat us, where we belong in the world. All of these things spring from little decisions that us adults make, little decisions that as adults we don’t usually give a lot of weight to. But the school's decision to hold back my son for three weeks because he wasn’t potty-trained could now make him insecure for the rest of his life about trying to overcome a new obstacle in his life. And it could be a minor insecurity, one that he never expresses to anyone. Yet it may lurk there forever, just under the skin, just taunting him, making him one day decide not to pursue something because he’s afraid he won’t be able to succeed at it. All because he wasn’t potty-trained by age 3.
Makes me understand the complexities of raising children even more. The worst part is you won’t know if you’ve done any kind of damage for years. Years. And you may never know, because the insecurities that start at age 3 can grow and evolve into such bigger issues that finding the root cause will be impossible twenty years later.
What a frightening thought.
It’s thoughts like these that keep me up at four in the morning. Maybe I should take a sleeping pill next time, save myself some anxiety.