Sit. Stay.

Toddlers peeing, toddlers pub-going

Kyle, who I am informed is not in fact a character in a Midsomer Murders

It’s tough out there for… parents? Children? Some mix thereof? I don’t even mean the usual thing of, work-life balance, wherein you’re meant to do everything as usual even though kids sometimes get sick and whatnot. I mean two recent stories, specifically.

First, there is the NYC mom who was fined for her 4-year-old’s public urination. In my old neighborhood of Battery Park City, even! But I lived there pre-kids and have no idea where a kid would pee there. (The Whole Foods? But that’s already up in Tribeca almost.) They had gone to the public restroom (as these are called Stateside) but it was closed because reasons as they inevitably are, and the pee did what it inevitably does. I stand with everyone who thinks this is a ridiculous reason for a fine, even of $50. The fine, and the public humiliation from the cops, as described in the article.

For reasons I cannot wrap my head around, it’s public urination if a child’s pee is on the ground, but not, presumably, if it first makes a stop in a 4-year-old’s clothes, and from there onto whichever other surfaces that 4-year-old comes into contact with before changing. In a park in particular one of these things is so much worse, and it is not the one where a child’s pee intermingles with the pee not only of part of the adult population but also of dogs, squirrels, etc.

There is an epic response tweet from someone who has the blue check that signals ‘pay me for my outrageous take’ and it is a doozy: “This is really about little boys learning that the world is their toilet. Little girls have to hold it. I managed never to pee in public as a small child. Sorry.”

Speaking as a Girl Mom, I can tell you that… I can just tell you that. Is all I can tell you, lady. If you are, as you appear to be, a grown adult, you don’t remember where your pee went when you were 4. You’re remembering where it went when you were 10 or whatever, which is something else entirely. You’re remembering where you peed en route to your high school prom, or when you were running errands last week. Not when you were at an age they still make Disney pull-ups for.

The boy in the story “has anxiety issues and sensory processing disorder, a fairly common condition that affects how the brain receives and responds to information. It can sometimes cause [him] to not be aware that he needs the bathroom until the very last minute.” That may be, and by all means cancel Ms. Blue Check for being ableist, but the bathroom bit sounds pretty standard. Before they put a porta-potty next to the splash pad, at least, this was my impression of children of that age generally.

But the world doesn’t care! It’s like, can’t a 4-year-old just have the bladder control and general reasonableness of an adult, and if they don’t can’t they stay locked up in 4-year-old-landia until they do?

Which brings me to the other story: a tweet by a 30-something (?) hipster (?) British (?) man, in front of a pub with a “dog-friendly, child free” sign, which he’s captioned, “Found my new local.” (This is British for, this will be his new hangout.) He’s posing pointing at the sign, squatting (does he have to… go?), looking cool in his sunglasses, so as to protect himself from the glare of British sunshine I guess.

Some of this is, to some hashing it out online, lost in translation. Babies in bars discourse doesn’t apply here because UK pubs, as I understand it (having I think been inside exactly one, in London, in my life, but having watched a LOT of British television), aren’t bars. They are public houses, public, where you can go and also get a meal. It would be normal for children to be in a pub. It’s a place people go at times of day when it’s normal to be out with kids. This isn’t someone going to the pick-up joint at midnight with their 7-year-old.

But America is the only place, so Twitter is doing babies-in-bars discourse, undeterred. Get a babysitter already cry the people who it is fair to say have no idea. (My kids are 2 and 5 and while we have availed ourselves of daycare aplenty and have had ‘dates’ aka lunch out without kids) we have yet to hire a babysitter. There are a variety of reasons for this (Covid era being about 3 years in Toronto, needing a sitter who could use an epi-pen which rules out local 12-year-olds) but it is mainly that once the children are asleep I am keeping my eyes open to do a last bit of work before following their lead. I did go out (she says, in Dorothy Zbornak voice; it has been known to happen but is not a regular occurrence these days) on Friday night, but sans plus-one, because funnily enough you cannot leave a 2 and 5 year old home alone.

Here I feel tempted to digress into how-other-people-spend-money discourse. Or even tipping discourse, because it’s kind of the same thing—if you can afford to leave your house in the evening, surely you can afford to tip 30% and also hire a fairly-paid babysitter. My overuse of the word “discourse” gets at how abstract this all is for me, a person who has never once left the house.

There is a false belief—popular not only among (some!!) people without kids, but also some with kids, but kids of a certain sort, who were kids of a certain sort themselves—that you can make little kids do things. That they can be trained. That if they act in inappropriate ways in a public setting, it’s because their parents said that this is great and wonderful and took some sort of philosophical, gentle-parenting stance towards the behavior. The reality is that children are people, and are all different, and act in different ways, no matter their parents, as anyone who has met siblings before may have picked up on.

You cannot give your human child a liver treat at the right moment and get obedience, although in fairness, our poodle was the same.