Another Reason Working Parents Deserve a Hand

Let us now talk of poo. As in, my daughter's.

As she approached her third birthday still bubble-butted in diapers, I pondered this Zen koan: If both parents work fulltime, how is a child supposed to learn how to go on the potty?

We had no idea. The time-tested methods offered by other parents mostly involve letting the toddler toddle around sans pants and scurrying them into the loo when they began to dribble. You see the issue here for a working parent. Could the switch be achieved over a working parent's jammed weekend, in between grocery shopping, dry cleaning pickup, mowing the lawn, four loads of laundry and a visit to Grandma's?

Like the argument over bottle vs. breast, I believe the challenge of potty-training is completely different for parents who work than it is for those who don't. I knew that when I first learned about the diaper-free baby movement. These mamas potty trained their wee ones at as young as three months. In an article I read, they spoke confidently--even smugly, I thought--of knowing and responding to their child's every cue so as to time the potty runs. Once again, you see the issue for a working parent.

I'm not setting this up as an us vs. them smackdown. Boomer journalists love to think we parents are all about tearing each other down for our choices, and I won't have it in my tiny corner of the blogosphere. I'm just saying that there's a dearth of help, advice or praise for parents holding down jobs who still try to hurdle the many challenges of childraising.

So we began by preparing Mika with the Potty Time with Elmo video, which I got free when I met Kevin Clash, the puppeteer behind the red monster (he wrote a nice book that came out last summer called My Life as a Furry Red Monster). It's really cute, and when you meet Kevin it'll make sense that the monster that plays Elmo's daddy sounds like a black man from the South. She loved the video. She hated the potty. That's not true: she liked to use it as a prop to act out scenes from the video.

Elmo (aka Kevin Clash) prepares my kid for the potty.

Then we switched her to pull-up diapers, thinking this would prepare her for underpants. Pull-up diapers, if you are not familiar, often fail to hold the contents of a two-year-old's bladder. I learned this at a crowded Barnes & Noble in Edgewater, N.J.

As I was dressing her Monday morning, I simply put her in underpants. And--I swear on my Opapa's grave--that was that. She's had a couple of accidents, and she still wears diapers at night. As working parent, we get to thinking nothing, but nothing is ever easy for us. Maybe our kids figure that out early and cut us a break sometimes.

Speaking of potties: job site Vault.com released a survey today of gender issues in the workplace that, among other things, found that unisex bathrooms are becoming a workplace norm. Over half of offices have single-occupancy bathrooms that are open to both sexes. That's not exactly the unisex made famous in Ally McBeal, but Vault says "this reflects a significant increase from a decade ago, when workplace bathrooms were more likely to be segregated by the sexes."

Said one female respondent: “Most folks have co-ed bathrooms in their houses, right?” However not everyone agrees that sharing a bathroom is good for business. One male respondent said: “We have a unisex bathroom here and it is in a constant state of zoo- cage cleanliness.”

Ew.