I’ll tell you who gets anxious: the parents, that’s who. Young parents spend much of their time thinking and talking about their children’s bodily functions. You can take an educated, sophisticated couple who, before their child was born, talked about great literature and the true meaning of life, and for the first two years after they become parents, their conversations will center on the consistency of their child’s stool, to the point where nobody invites them over for dinner.
Around the child’s second birthday, the parents get tired of waiting for the child to become anxious about his bodily functions, and they decide to give him some anxiety in the form of potty training. This is probably a good thing. A child can go only so far in life without potty training. It is not mere coincidence that six of the last seven presidents were potty trained, not to mention nearly half of the nation’s state legislators.
The Traditional Potty Training Technique
The traditional potty training technique is to buy a book written by somebody who was out getting graduate school degrees when his own children were actually being potty trained. My wife bought a book that claimed we could potty train our child in one day, using a special potty that (I swear this is true) played “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” when the child went in it. She also got a little book for our son that explained potty training in terms that a small child could understand, such as “poo-poo.
Now there may well be some parents, somewhere, who managed to potty train their child in one day, but I am willing to bet they used a cattle prod. My wife read that book all the way through, and she did exactly what it said, which was that you should feed your child a lot of salty snacks so that it would drink a lot of liquids and consequently would have to pee about every 20
minutes, which would give it lots of opportunities to practice going in the musical potty, so that it would have the whole procedure nailed down solid by the end of the day. That was the theory.
When I left home that morning, my wife was reading the poo-poo book to Robert. She had a cheerful, determined look on her face. When I got home that evening, more than ten hours later, there were cracker crumbs everywhere, and piles of soiled child’s underpants, seemingly hundreds of them, as if the entire junior class of St. Swithan’s School for Incontinent Children had been there on a field trip. My wife was still in her nightgown. I don’t think she had even brushed her teeth. It is extremely fortunate for the man who wrote the potty training book that he did not walk in the door with me, because the police would have found his lifeless body lying in the bushes with an enormous bulge in his throat playing “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star.”
We did, in the end, get Robert potty trained. We did it the same way everybody does, the same way you will, by a lot of nagging and false alarms and about 30,000 accidents and endless wildly extravagant praise for bowel movements (“Honey! Come and see what Robert did!” “Oh Robert, that’s wonderful!” etc.).
The big drawback to potty training is that, for a while, children assume that all adults are as fascinated with it as their parents seem to be. Robert would walk up to strangers in restaurants and announce, “I went pee-pee.” And the strangers would say, “Ah.” And Robert would say, “I didn’t do poop.” And the strangers would say, “No?” And Robert would say, “I’m gonna do poop later.” And so on.
Nutrition
By the middle of the second year, your baby’s Food-Return Loop has disappeared, so its mouth is connected directly to its stomach. At this point, you want to adjust its diet to see that each day it gets food from all three Basic Baby Food Nutrition Groups (see chart). You also should encourage your baby to feed itself, so that you won’t have to be in the room.
The Basic Baby Food Nutrition Groups
FOODS THAT BABIES HURL AT THE CEILING
• Anything from jars with babies on the labels
• Anything the baby ate the day before, so you went out and bought $30 worth of it
FOODS THAT BABIES HURL AT THE DOG
• Anything in a weighty container
• Taffy
• Zwieback (NOTE: Zwieback has sharp edges, so the dog should wear protective clothing)
FOODS THAT BABIES EAT
• Anything from vending machines
• Caulking
• Anything with dead ants on it
• Sand
Chapter 11
THE THIRD YEAR
This period is often referred to as the “terrible twos,” not so much because children this age start behaving any worse than before, but because they reach the size where if they swing at you, they’ll hit you square in the crotch.
The important thing to remember here is that your child is only trying to establish its independence. This is a necessary part of its development: It must learn to make its own decisions, to interact with the world directly rather than through the protective mediation of its parents. Your child must also learn that when it hits a bigger person in the crotch, it should pretend to be very, very sorry.
How to Discipline a Two-Year-Old
Discipline during this phase consists of choosing the appropriate Escalating Futile Parental Disciplinary Threat. A handy reference chart is printed here for your use.
Remember that when your two-year-old “misbehaves,” it’s usually because of his natural curiosity. It is not cruelty that causes him to thrust a Bic pen deep into the dog’s nostril; it is a genuine desire to find out how you will react.
The time-tested way to react is to work your way up the ladder of Traditional Escalating Futile Parental Disciplinary Threats.
The Traditional Escalating Futile Parental Disciplinary Threats
1. “You’re going to poke somebody’s eye out.”
2. “You’re going to make me very angry.”
