Object #4: Tiny Toilets
No one is a kid for long, but there will always be kids. Let me draw you a population pyramid.
My favorite thing about the preschool that Mirah went to is that there was a tiny toilet. She started there in January of 2020, and then we potty trained her while everyone was home during March 2020, and when she went back to school in June, it was there, waiting for her. The tiny toilet is sized just right for three year old butts, the toilet paper is at just the right height, and it’s accompanied by a matching tiny sink, where the kids can wash her hands all on their own. Preschool bathroom world was not divided into girls’ bathrooms and boys’ bathrooms; instead the distinction is bathrooms for kids, and bathrooms for grownups — same stuff at different scales.
The public school bathrooms in Pre-K and Kindergarten (and presumably the older grades too) have regular sized toilets, and M has adjusted just fine. But I think often, fondly, about that tiny toilet, and that feeling is then followed by rage that there has only ever been ONE TINY TOILET in her life: nowhere else we go has has a toilet made for small tiny bottoms.
Brooklyn, where we live, has 139,596 kids between 2 and 5, according to 2019 American Community Survey estimates.1 New York City has 407,988 kids that age,2 more than the entire population of Tampa or New Orleans. And yet, there are no tiny toilets at the Brooklyn Children’s Museum, at the Prospect Park Zoo, Bronx Zoo, or the Central Park Zoo, at the New York Aquarium, at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, in our local playground bathroom, or even at our pediatrician's office (a chain that has 29 locations in New York City). Every time we went at one of these places when M was between the ages of 2 and 4 I become part of the league of bathroom parents struggling to make the space work for their kids. We had a folding potty seat to put on the too-big toilets, but bathroom stalls don’t comfortably fit a parent and a kid (and a backpack) so we had to squeeze and do-si-do. The sinks are too tall for independent hand washing and the automatic hand driers are so loud and frightening. And if the children’s museum’s bathroom architecture is so hostile to its main customers, how could I ever hope for better somewhere like an airport?
The conversations about kids in public places often center on babies: advocacy for the right to nurse in public (the Brooklyn Children’s Museum FAQ declares “Breastfeeding is welcome any time, any place in the Museum”) and increasing the amount of changing tables in public bathrooms (In 2019, after a New York City councilman watched a dad awkwardly change a diaper on a bathroom sink, he pushed forward a law mandating that all bathrooms for all genders have changing tables). At root, these conversations are about the rights and abilities of baby-toting parents to be in public spaces. They are the ones doing the changing and feeding. Once the babies become kids, it’s all about whether their annoyances should be minimized or hidden. Kids on airplanes. Kids at weddings. Kids at bars. My daughter loves the world; she wants to go places, ask questions, understand the difference between a bus stop and a public bench, know why there is trash in the street or what’s in that truck. The world, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to want to acknowledge her much at all. When my partner took her to DC for a trip three summers ago, he was flummoxed when he realized that you can’t order an Uber with a car seat there, as you can in NYC. They spent the weekend getting around on the metrobus instead, moving slowly.
When M was still in diapers, before I cared about the tiny toilets, I was hyper-focused on high chairs in public places; their presence signaled that we belonged. On a trip to Denmark when M was 6 months old there were stacks and stacks of cheap IKEA high chairs everywhere we went: every restaurant, brewery, and even the library cafeteria. Not only do we tolerate your child, the stacks proclaimed, we expect them! Have a beer! After we got back to the US, I looked at presumably baby-friendly Brooklyn with new eyes: the bar that was the meetup for often four or five different parent groups simultaneously didn’t even have a single high chair available. They had sturdy picnic-style tables though, and so I started bringing our clip-on travel high chair when I went there, resentful of the need to BYO.
(About that clip-on high chair: a new pizza place opened up on our corner when M was a few months old. The first time we went, I packed the clip-on, which I was glad for because they definitely didn’t have a high chair. The guy behind the counter just stared as I struggled to attach the chair seat with the kid still in the ergo carrier on my front. Once the chair was attached, the center-pedestal table tipped over with the extra weight. I left, hungry and in tears, flipping off the building as we walked back home. 4 years later I haven’t been back. A now-closed local bar, Hot Bird, was legendary for it’s firm “no kids” stance, but this place just kept us out with contempt.)
This past November, our family went to cast our votes (in the gym of Mirah’s elementary school, which both makes sense and is very cool from a neighborhood institution point of view). Two different poll workers were excited to give M an “I’m a future voter!” sticker. Later, as I was peeling the sticker off the floor at the end of the day, I realized that the thousands of those stickers printed and distributed to poll sites around the state meant that not only were kids not barred from joining their grownups while they voted, but that the election apparatus expects that kids will be there and welcomes them into the civic fold with stickers of their very own.
Pandemic life changed the equation—all of a sudden there were no toilets anywhere, of any size. Park bathrooms were closed, we didn’t go to restaurants or museums or other people’s houses. With a plastic potty shoved under the stroller, it was suddenly only the toddler who had a reasonable place to pee when we were outside. A lifetime of having to bring our own meant that M was equipped for a city without bathrooms for anyone, and no one gave us any strange looks as she peed al fresco in parks or playgrounds, on the Brighton Beach boardwalk, or sometimes just on the sidewalk. Now that things are open again, this small privilege is gone.
Mirah can now go to the bathroom in a museum or restaurant by herself which is one of those unexpected parenting milestones that’s really delightful. But now the baby— Saul—is one, and all the same feelings are coming back: he needs a high chair in the cafeteria of the National Air and Space Museum (there isn’t one), and in a year or so he will go to a preschool with a tiny toilet and learn how to use it, and everywhere else will be chaotic and difficult I will seethe, which is my job as a parent: to make a fuss on his behalf. Children are people, they are citizens, museumgoers, and future voters. They need a city that suits their size; there will always be new tiny butts.
Object Permanence Rating: I think that permanence isn’t really the right metric here — I’d like to see growth, expansion, of tiny toilets and tiny sinks and tiny tables and tiny chairs. The need for these fixtures is temporary, but there will always be kids who need them. Permanence of tiny butts: 10/10.
Note! Object Permanence is a newsletter about things, and rating their permanence. If you’re getting this in your email, it’s because you’re my friend and I signed you up without asking. There are a few previous posts you can read: #1 is about cat diapers, #2 is about kids’ scooters, and #3 is about a KitchenAid grinder attachment I found on the street. Go ahead and forward this to whoever. I promise there will be more, but not on any regular schedule.