Simply tell your child to stop sh*tting their pants at school

It’s been six months since the last one, so we are due for a moral panic about children not being toilet trained when they reach school. These “articles” all follow a similar pattern. So let’s discuss it...

Why are we talking about toilet training in the media again? 😤

Grandparents who see their grandchildren once a year and complain that their grandchild’s hair is too long need something to distract them from their daily routine of eight hours of consuming AI slop reels of Shrimp Jesus returning to kill the immigrants on Facebook.

You know when a cat is meowing and meowing and you’re like, ‘I literally just fed you’. This is a subsection of 65+ year-olds out there (#NotAllBoomers). They might have just read an opinion piece about how children are shitting in litter boxes in schools, and that might have satiated them for an hour, but they always want more. More parents saying you shouldn’t smack your kids. More parents saying they’re teaching their child they don’t have to kiss their great aunt on the lips. It’s their food and fuel.

Hold on Emily, doesn’t the article say that kids are starting school without being toilet trained?

Sure, it says that. But what’s the evidence? They spoke to one person and based the entire piece around her opinion.

She works for the Child Continence Service; she knows!

I am absolutely sure she knows more about helping parents to toilet-train their kids than I do, but the article stated she runs her own business, right? It says the Child Continence Service is a business, not a charity, and not part of Plunket, right? Oh, it didn’t say that? It implied it was part of Plunket? Didn’t it say she needs parents to pay her $270 + GST for an initial appointment? With 3-4 more sessions at $140+ GST? That’s so weird that it didn’t say that.

Ok, but they did talk to the Early Childhood Council. So, they did ask a group that knows what ECE teachers are concerned about.

That’s great. What did they say?

They said they aren't seeing more children leaving ECE unable to use the toilet independently.

LOL. ROFL. LMAO.

To be fair, the woman running the business said some children have disabilities. She said, “About one in five kids have a disability that could impact their ability to be fully toilet trained and independent when they start school”.

Oh wow, credit where credit is due. In a classroom of 30, that would be 5-6 kids, huh? Do you think she’s suggesting that 10+ kids in new entrant classes aren’t toilet trained? That would be an epidemic. I wonder why they could only find one person who believed that was the case.

Hmm.

Was she advocating for a teacher aide in every classroom? Was she suggesting the government needs to put more funding into disability support? She must be really politically active to believe that this many kids aren’t toilet trained.

Well, she didn’t say anything political, but the article was based around National’s Before School checks.

Oh, where they check if a child is toilet trained? And then they give no funding to support the school in managing toilet training? The check where they tell a parent they need to sort out their child’s disability, then give no funding to early intervention services to prepare them for school? That one?

Yeah. That one. But the article says, “research from the UK has also found a similar trend, with one in four children in England and Wales starting school not toilet trained, accounting for 2.4 hours of teacher time lost each day supporting children who are not school-ready”.

One in four? And it's believed one in five children have a disability?

HMMMM.

The piece says that “research also found the age of potty training has crept up from just over two years in the 1950s, to just over three in the 2000s, with more recent research suggesting about a quarter of parents are starting after two and a half”.

I wonder what was different in the 1950s? Was it maybe that less than 30 percent of women were in the workforce, they worked fewer hours, took longer leave when they had babies, and were more likely to leave their jobs when they married and had kids and cloth nappies were much more common? Perhaps it was something like that.

The first comment on Facebook about this story says there weren’t so many kids with disabilities in the 50s and that autism never existed back then and the poster knows a former teacher who taught for six months back in 1931 who said there were never any kids with autism at school.

Oh yes, the 30s-60s – the golden age of lobotomies. I wonder what was happening when these commenters were in school? Oh, mass institutionalisation? The Inquiry into Abuse in State Care says a lot about this. They talked to hundreds of survivors whose first entry into state care was due to being Deaf or disabled.

“Twenty-three percent of these survivors were voluntarily placed in the setting by their parents. This was often due to parents not being supported to manage and care for their child, or parents experiencing mental distress. Some survivors also spoke about being unwanted by their parents. A further 21 percent of these survivors indicated they were placed in care because authorities recommended it to their whānau as the best option, or their whānau felt like they had no other options”.

They did talk to a principal, and he said it was "bad."

Oh wow, weird that he would go to the media about this, breaching the trust of the parents whose children are in his care, to push what is essentially a puff piece for National policy that provides no funding for actual support for children. Did he blame it on –

Screen time? Screen time.

Jinx! We both said the same thing hahahahaaaaaaaaaaa.

He did say 80% of kids in his school can’t hold a pencil, can’t hold scissors and are unable to sit still.

Wow. That doesn’t sound like a made-up statistic. Let’s say this is true – why would only one teacher be saying this? Wouldn't it be something all teachers were saying? I mean 80%? That’s almost every kid.

And the cause is-

Screen time.

Yeah, screen time, of course lol.

And the way to fix this is... tough love?

Yeah he said tough love.

I knew it. Did he talk about disability? What about the lack of funding for children who have English as a second language and PTSD from minor things like escaping countries at war? What about the cost-of-living crisis and extra stress at home from families being out of work, rising unemployment and food and housing insecurity. What about the fact that processed foods are much easier to prepare than fresh fruit and veges and that has a huge impact on the diets of children?

No, but teachers can’t be changing nappies in class.

I totally agree! Absolutely! Which is why we need a teacher aide in every classroom and funding for early intervention support for children struggling with skills like toileting, eating, speaking and mobility!

Do they not have enough support?

Well, I can only say my experience in the system with a disabled child left a lot to be desired. There was a long waitlist for the continence service, and when we were finally seen, the woman said, ‘Every child has autism these days’. Our child was non-speaking at the time, so that was fun. I’m sure many parents can tell you how affirming the 10-minute publicly funded one-off continence service is.

So, what’s the answer?

I don’t know, but I know that dumping on parents and blaming them for their child not yet having the skill of toilet training isn’t the answer. And labelling everything a social issue then divorcing it from its political context is absolutely pointless and only serves as rage bait further isolating parents who are already struggling through a cost-of-living crisis that means they’re unable to spend as much time with their children as they want to. Also we have to start declaring business interests when publishing the views of ‘experts’. But that’s another story entirely.

Cough Nathan Wallis Cough.

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