Is two years too early for them to start going to the bathroom alone? For most children, yes. Especially for the boys. Or at least it is the conclusion reached by pediatricians in the United States and, today, approximately only half of the children in the United States. They go alone to the bathroom with three years.
Chinese grandmothers would be horrified at this idea because in china children wearing kaidangku pants They already know how to do it for themselves with two years. This piece of traditional closet is open by the crotch, allowing children to urinate and defecate freely without removing their clothes. This outfit remains the first choice for pants for young children in rural areas of China.
Many parents are reluctant to try new methods to teach their child to go to the bathroom (not to mention all the other things that the child has to learn) because they believe there is only one logical way and it has always worked.
Today, parents are bombarded with recommendations that they claim to be scientifically supported and that they are suitable for all children, even with strategies that can be contradictory. In English alone, there are more than 2,000 advice books for fathers and mothers, not counting the large number of blogs. There is even a parody of this genre. All this makes modern parents feel confused when deciding how to raise their children.
As an anthropologist, I have studied different ways of raising children all over the world for 25 years. I have lived with my husband (the writer Philip Graham) in small villages in the rainforest of West Africa for long periods of time and I am convinced that humans are a very resistant species that is able to thrive in very different environments.
Discovering the incredible diversity of ways to raise a child has caused us to rethink and change some of the ways in which we raise our own (things like sharing the bed, independence and household chores, for example).There is no model that is valid for everyone when giving recommendations on how to raise a child. To spread this idea, some of my classmates and I have worked together on the book “A World of Babies: Imagined Childcare Guides for Eight Societies” based so much on our research in the field as in the case of other authors in places ranging from Israel and the territories of Palestine to China, Portugal, Peru, Denmark, Ivory Coast and even the Somali-American community of Minneapolis (United States).
Teach to go to the bathroom since they are born?
Why do parents choose a specific parenting method? Many times it is due to economic reasons or to what they have access to. Let's focus on the case of learning to go to the bathroom.
In Ivory Coast, mothers begin to teach their children to go to the bathroom a few days after they are born administering enemas twice a day from the day on which the remnants of the umbilical cord are detached. When the child is already a few months old, their caregivers no longer have to worry about doing it several times a day.
What is behind a practice that seems so extreme? On the one hand, in the rural areas of the Ivory Coast no access to disposable diapers (as in many parts of the southern hemisphere). In addition, even if they can be purchased in some local markets, it is a product that few families can afford. In fact, it is something that the environment can not afford either if we take into account the estimates of some environmentalists that “use and throw away” diapers are the third most common use and disposal product in landfills and that for their manufacture 26,000 million liters of crude oil are needed per year.
But economic reasons and or accessibility to diapers are only part of the story. The work structure and cultural values also influence the choice of parents.
In Ivory Coast (and throughout sub-Saharan Africa), babies spend most of their time on someone's back and many times it is not about the mother because she has to work in the crops of the fields to feed her large family. The society of the rural areas of Ivory Coast (unlike the Chinese society) thinks that the feces (including those of the babies) are something repulsive and only the fact of thinking that a baby can do it to him while it is behind his back It is very disgusting.
Taking into account the local opinion about feces, no babysitter would take care of a child who could do it while carrying it on her back and that is why it is important that they learn to go to the bathroom from an early age so that the mother can work in the field without worries. In this sense, the fact that they learn from very young to go to the bathroom helps the mother's family to provide their family with an adequate amount of food.
This practice can horrify a Western person, imagining that the baby can suffer long-term emotional sequelae from trauma at such an early age. However, leaving aside the ravages of poverty that pose a risk to health and that deny families educational and economic possibilities, these babies who learn to regulate their needs from such an early age end up being adults so happy and balanced like children who have grown up wearing diapers.
Context counts in what works
This practice may not motivate readers other than Ivory Coast. In the United States (and in all developed countries), women's work needs can also determine the way children are taught to go to the bathroom, even at a later age.
Many nurseries only accept children who already know how to go to the bathroom alone, so if a mother does not have anyone to take care of her child at home she will go crazy in order to get her little child to go to the bathroom alone as soon as possible to return To work full time.For mothers who stay at home, or mothers who have family members who can take care of their child, the different situations in life are those that dictate decisions about when children learn to go to the bathroom. In the territories of Palestine, for example, many mothers start teaching them to go to the bathroom when they are 14 or 15 months old. They can start at an early age because they don't usually work outside the home and have time for it. On the contrary, if a Palestinian woman works, she may start teaching the child to go to the bathroom at a later age, about two years. In that case, the women of the family clan (“hamula”) will take care of the child while the mother works and there is no pressure for the child to learn to go to the bathroom only as soon as possible.
As soon as we see how people live in their day-to-day lives, some practices cease to seem as exotic or even abusive as at the beginning (open pants or children's enemas). If we open the minds of first-time parents to "other" ways of raising their children we can make calm down at the pressure that if they don't "do the right thing" Your children will grow bad. As soon as we explore equivalent customs and other ways of raising children, it is clear that there are many "right ways" to make a child learn to do things.
Author: Alma Gottlieb, Emeritus Professor of Anthropology, African Studies, and Gender and Women's Studies, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
This article has originally been published in The Conversation. You can read the original article here.
Translated by Silvestre Urbón.
