While our kid
was in diapers, I don’t know that he really gave any thought at all to poop. He
could walk around with a big ol’ truck-full in his pants and not give it a second
thought. It was this vaguely squishy thing that happened below his waist and
Mommy and Daddy would discover it and take his pants off for a few minutes. —
During potty
training, we went on a whole Poop Awareness Campaign. If you can’t get the kid
to notice when he’s about to poop, the training rocket never gets off the
ground. So we started an ongoing poop dialogue.
“Yes, you’ve
always just pooped in your diaper. But big boys don’t do that. Daddy’s a big
boy and Daddy poops in the potty. Mommy poops in the potty, too.”
“Well, Momo
poops outside because he’s a dog. That’s not where we go, because we’re
people.”
“Yes, I know
that Sven poops in the litter box and sometimes it just sits there for days. That’s
because Mommy is forgetful and Daddy apparently has defective olfactory
nerves.”
“It means your
sense of smell.”
And so on.
This dialogue
changed completely when the kid started actually using the potty. Suddenly, he
noticed everything about poop. He noticed more detail about his own poop than I
would ever care to discuss outside a doctor’s office. He noticed every piece of
dog poop on the street.
And we couldn’t
just shut down the poop dialogue. We couldn’t just say, “Well, now that you’re
using the potty, we’ll all agree that poop is a shameful, disgusting thing and
we will never speak of it again.”
We were left,
then, with the very delicate task of talking about poop in a way that doesn’t
turn poop into something he feels he needs to hide from us and, at the same
time, doesn’t make him so comfortable with it that he’s willing to pick it up
off the street with his bare hands.
Which is where a
book like Artie Bennett’s Poopendous comes in so incredibly handy. It treats
the subject pretty matter-of-factly. The rhymes and illustrations make it
nicely lighthearted. It does a beautiful job of walking the line between
“everyone does it and it’s just part of life” and “it’s not something you want
to bring in for show-and-tell.” Plus, it’s so packed with information that it’s
perfect for a parent whose kid is firmly in the “why” phase but who doesn’t
want to dig up a lot of fecal facts.
In summation,
Poopendous is a practical way to broaden the poop dialogue as part of any Poop Awareness Campaign. Onwards.
And for more of Joe’s adventures in potty training his son, check out “The Family Room.”
Joe Wack currently
teaches science to elementary school children in the Bronx. He lives in Harlem with his wife and 3-year-old son.
For more on Joe, see our contributors list to the right.
