Slate's Care & Feeding, February 22 2024, “I’m Shocked by What Parents Are Supposedly Doing With Potty Training Now.”
The LW is shocked, and Care & Feeding scarcely helps at all.
Link to the original letter here.
My take: Despite Slate’s photo of the toddler with his arm deep in the toilet bowl, which I confess I find hilarious, the letter isn’t really about that. Rather, this LW has a daughter who used to work in day care, and the daughter reports that parents today are AWOL on potty training. The LW is also shocked that Utah wants to pass a law saying kids have to be potty-trained to enter kindergarten. Why, she asks, should this even be necessary?
Before we get to Care & Feeding’s answer, I have to share this article, because it’s relevant, and because it includes one of the most jaw-dropping statistics I’ve ever read, on any topic, anywhere. It was published in the New York Times more than 20 years ago, in 1999.
“In 1957,” it says, “92 percent of children were toilet-trained by the age of 18 months.” “Today [meaning 1999] the figure for 2-year-olds is just 4 percent.”
From 92% to 4%! And the 4% was actually for kids older than 18 months!
It’s a staggering difference. And since babies didn’t change between 1957 and 1999, I guess we have to attribute the shift to cultural factors (child-rearing philosophies; recommended practices) or environmental conditions (availability of disposable diapers would be my best guess).
Anyway. This question for Care & Feeding is tough to answer, because it isn’t particularly specific. It just amounts to “what’s the world coming to?” as so many letters to advice columnists do. On top of that, the topic is politically loaded (and why is it loaded, by the way?).
That said, Care & Feeding really isn’t useful at all. It just refers readers to another Slate article that assumes the whole phenomenon (late toilet training) can be attributed to a single medical condition, on the testimony of one doctor.
As a non-doctor I’ll go out on a limb and say multiple factors are probably at play, and I’ll refer you again to that Times article I just mentioned.
Chance this letter is fake: I actually give this a decent chance of being fake. It’s a hot political issue, and there’s a new law on the table in Utah. “My daughter worked in a day care” might be a pretext for a LW who really just wants to blow off steam about it. But even if the question is fake, Care & Feeding could have dug a lot deeper with the answer.