For twenty-five years, Eva has been a nursery teacher in Barcelona. During this time she has witnessed many changes in parenting, but there is one thing that surprises her today: “Until about five years ago, out of eighteen children, two or three still wore diapers… Today it is the other way around! There are three that do not carry it. It’s a total game changer,” she explains.
Eva is an educator for children between the ages of two and three, an age at which, if there is no specific difficulty, they can begin to control their sphincters (at least during the day). “However, when I ask the parents why they haven’t removed it yet, they say ‘they don’t see it ready.'” Consequently, and although the nurseries have infrastructure for this eventuality, Eva says that she spends more and more time changing the children in her care.
Alicia is also a kindergarten teacher, but in Kindergarten. She works in a public school near Barcelona and, more than children without diapers, what she detects are “more families asking if their children can start school wearing one.” The answer is that, unless there is some specific difficulty, they should come without. “In P3 we are already talking about a single teacher and we cannot be changing diapers. Also, in most schools there are no changing tables… That’s why we tell parents to take care of it. We cannot force them, of course, but we can ask them”. Do they listen to them? “When you explain it to them, they do it, and in the end they all come without a diaper… Although there are some who have taken it off the day before,” she points out.
A few months ago, a commented story in the ABC newspaper revealed that in Switzerland the issue of nappies was becoming a problem in schools. The president of the Swiss Association of Teachers explained that it is increasingly common for children to go to school, at the age of four, using them. The issue has opened a national debate on the responsibilities of families and educational centers: for teachers, the fact that they still wear a diaper is due to the comfort of parents. These, for their part, argue that what they do is be “respectful” of the rhythms of the children, who should not be forced into toilet training.
The “respect” argument —the basis of a parenting style with the same name— is difficult to counter: What father or mother does not want to respect their children? However, doubts arise: Is respecting a child allowing them to continue peeing or pooping at ages when, in children without pathologies, this is something controllable? As pointed out in the aforementioned note, when there are children up to eleven years old who go to school in diapers, we have a problem. Not only at the level of logistics, but also bullying and self-esteem: respect, then, becomes negligence.
“I could tell you that there are more and more children who stop using diapers later, but it is important to analyze why and see that it has to do with the fact that children have been taken into account,” explains Eva Sargatal, Secretary of the Association of Mestres Rosa Sensat. For this teacher, leaving the diaper is a physiological fact, which is part of a maturational process: “And, historically, in our culture what has been done is ‘train’ boys and girls to learn: the time to learn to pee was also like that”. Sargatal remembers that image of the child “sitting on a potty or on the toilet, who couldn’t get up.” A method: “That, obviously, ends up giving its results, but does not take into account the physiological and maturational process.”
Studies, “especially those related to neuroscience,” says Sargatal, indicate that the process of removing a child’s diaper implies that their time is respected. “And any maturational process that does not respect the rhythms can have a negative impact. A child who has learned to walk in a forced way, for example, will walk, but it will not do so naturally and that will make it very difficult for him to go up and down the stairs or he will be more insecure in the way he runs”.
With diapers, he says, it is somewhat the same: “A child who has been forced to go without a diaper, for example, has a very difficult time controlling poop. Or he can’t pee if there are more people… This is coming to us from the field of psychology”. And why are more and more boys and girls arriving in diapers? the teacher wonders: “Well, because they are children who have been taken more into account and their evolutionary process has been respected.”
But the evolutionary process that neuroscience indicates is neither four nor, of course, eleven years. The appropriate age to leave the diaper, explains Sargatal: “It ranges between two and three years, which is a broad normality: there are children who reach infanthood with two years, and we have to take that into account.” What used to happen at this juncture was that the process of removing the diaper during the summer was accelerated.
However, the image of that creature sitting on the urinal for hours has been gone for a long time. “I took my two children’s diapers off, now teenagers, in the summer before they started school and I didn’t feel like a ‘trainer’ at any time,” says a mother, who doesn’t quite understand the term or that there is controversy. on this question.
The term is not to the liking of the pediatrician Josep Serrano Marchuet, secretary of the Catalan Pediatric Society: “It is true, ‘training’ was used before. Now we say ‘accompaniment’, but the process is somewhat the same: first, detect that the child is competent, then make it easy for him and reward him when he does it well. Third: never punish or reprimand him when he does it wrong and, lastly, for me it is very important, if it doesn’t work when you try… don’t insist”.
To leave the diaper, continues this expert: “The child must have a cognitive development capable of understanding what you are explaining and sufficient motor capacity.” If you have both, it’s done in three or four days. “But if he’s not, that means he’s not ready or there’s something the parents aren’t doing right.” The pediatrician recommends that if more pee is collected from the floor than in the diaper, it is better to wait: “Three, six months… And try again.”
For Serrano Marchuet, the idea of ??”respectful” parenting is fine: “As long as you have some basic rules and knowledge to bring it to fruition: so it’s as bad as forcing us to remove the diaper because you have to go to the kindergarten – and it is not prepared – like we do the other way around. Neither one extreme nor the other, ”he summarizes. Can it “harm” the baby to remove the diaper prematurely? “Not at all,” he replies. “What it can do is make the child reject the situation and the process take longer. But that does not mean that he will have dire consequences or cause him any type of trauma or a future enuresis ”, he sums up.
For Marchuet, the age cut that is normally established to remove the diaper is from 18 months: “What does it mean? That below this age, unless you see an extremely high interest, you don’t even need to try it… But if at two and a half years old he hasn’t learned yet, well, perhaps you have to consider what happens: from that age would have all those capabilities developed to spare. Children, he explains, show signs of wanting to take off their diaper and “parents have to know how to empower them.” What signs? Gestures of taking it off themselves or that the diaper is often dry. In short: “That shows an interest in going to the bathroom, either spontaneously or promoted by parents.”
The pediatrician attributes this tendency to delay the end of the diaper to sociocultural issues. “It wouldn’t occur to me to attribute it to something deeper, like a regression of the human species or that children, now, acquire neurocognitive development later,” he ironically. “It is, basically, that today there is a more tolerant parenting style and fewer children. The current family model is different, neither better nor worse, than twenty-five years ago”.
What this expert is clear about is that leaving the diaper is the responsibility of the parents: “I think that too many things are being delegated to the school and it is true that the school can help, but it will not bear all the responsibility. This accompaniment has to be done in the family.”
Faced with changes, the school adapts. As Eva Sargatal recalls: “There are no regulations stating that the child must arrive without a diaper. The school has to adapt, so it will be necessary to reserve moments to clean that child, etc.” Doesn’t that imply an overload of a job that doesn’t correspond to them? For this teacher, “there are families that need accompaniment, because there is so much information that they are more lost.” And often, she points out, the closest professional is the teacher, who can give her the tools. “But it is obvious that, in this matter, there must be a commitment from the family: because if he goes without a diaper at school and wears it at home, the child himself will not understand anything.”
