I like the toilet seats that include the option for a mini seat for children. I've seen them in many homes and a few public spaces on standard sized toilets. I also dig "soft close" lids.
The thing that often gets me in public bathrooms is the lack of step stools to access normal counter height for hand washing. A very few large, recently constructed bathrooms will include a lower sink, but a step stool is cheap, portable, and can accommodate many. I find it easier to hold a toddler over a standard toilet than I do holding them up at the sink and simultaneously assisting with hand washing, which in my experience is what they need help with longer, after mastering toileting.
To balance out my toilet comment, I recently felt so seen when I had to bring my 1-yo along to my 4-yo’s rather long & tedious optometrist appointment at a local childrens hospital. Every single exam room (we bounced among multiple) had a bead maze mounted on the wall in front of the chairs where the parent/guardians sit at exact toddler height. It was amazing. The multi-hour appointment was so much less stressful and exhausting than it would have been in a conventional room. I think half of it is just the relief that comes from a place designed for children. It’s a way in which good design silently announces that you, as a parent, don’t have to handle everything alone. Truly a balm when so many public spaces are designed to the exclusion of children (and often obnoxious inclusion of pets instead).
First, a caveat to my poll answer - my church has a tiny toilet, but only in the nursery, which is not open for every Mass. However, there is an accessible bathroom where the toilet and sink are lower than standard, so while nothing in that space is "tiny" it does facilitate independence.
Physical accommodations - as I think about this, I am surprised to find that our church is the best place I know of, after my daughter's Montessori school, which has an admitted bias towards being physically constructed for children. We have "Mass bags" that are placed on a child-sized rack, so children can get them and return them independently, we have power door openers on all external doors, we have a fully accessible sanctuary (though accessibility to the ambo and altar for those who cannot navigate steps is limited to a ramp at the rear of the sanctuary space), there are at least two designated spaces for wheelchair users within the pews, there are two drinking fountains at different heights, a step stool in the bathroom, our nursery is currently being turned into a sensory room with a live stream of Mass available to watch for anyone who is there, etc.
A book I can recommend on this issue is My Body is Not A Prayer Request by Dr. Amy Kenny. Among other things I learned, churches fought HARD against the passage of ADA, which I found disappointing but unfortunately not surprising.
> Where (at church or elsewhere) have you seen the needs of children incorporated in the physical design of a mixed-age space?
There’s a large coffee shop near us that has a corner with a couch, carpet, and shelf of kids’ toys and books. It’s designed in such a way that any noise and antics are a little bit sheltered from the rest of the space, and yet it’s very visible. It clearly signals, “Everyone is welcome here, including little kids.”
Our local library also has a small toilet in the kids’ section bathrooms, which is excellent.
I haven’t seen it in person, but I know of churches where there’s a soft play area at the back of the sanctuary where little kids and caregivers can “actively listen”.
> Is there a time when putting a money value on “unpaid work” help clarify a decision or get better treatment? How did you run the numbers?
This is more a symptom of my own capitalism-brain than anything else, but it sometimes helps when I feel glum about full-time SAHMing to do a little back-of-the-envelope math about the market “value” of my work. That’s not really how I should measure my worth, and yet...
I would love to see *any* public restroom that has a child-sized toilet. The most frustrating examples being “family” restrooms that don’t even have sinks a child could reach. I’ve yet to encounter a child-sizes potty that we don’t have to haul with us everywhere we go.
I worked for some time as a medicaid caretaker for a baby with Down Syndrome. I adore him and his family, but here is where would push back about paid family caretakers. His mom has been working very hard to change laws around paid caregiving in our area for children with disabilities. These children already all qualify for paid caregivers, but the current laws don’t allow parents to be the paid caregiver. Some families are lucky enough to have grandparents who can fill that role, or, like the family I worked for, a friend (me) who was between jobs. But they don’t pay enough for anything close to the level of consistent care a parent could and does provide. But because of the liability rules, caregivers cannot drive the children or perform any kind of “medical” care... including such things as putting on a CPAP mask or Gtube feeding, both things that are involved in the day-to-day routine care of some children with disabilities (and the boy I cared for). So how was I, who was not allowed to do a good deal of his routine care nor able to drive him to his various doctor’s appointments, supposed to truly care for him? Each time, his mom would still have to be there. That level of involvement basically prohibits her from having most jobs. But lower income families would be even more affected, since hourly workers are even less likely to have the flexibility needed to care for a child with disabilities. When I hear wages for parents, I think about this family and the freedom it would give them to care for their own child, without worrying about how they would put food on the table, a level of care which other caregivers simply cannot provide. Both because of the regulations and also because they just cannot provide the same kind and depth of care as parents. I think this conversation looks different when families have greater or varying needs, but in all cases, I wonder if the problem isn’t so much does paying parents render parenting a efficient and commercial activity, but how can we restructure our society so that parents can really BE parents, regardless of the various needs or circumstances they have. I know this boy’s mother would give anything to be able to stay home and care for her boy forever, but when you have to balance your time with your child and the draining resources, that creates an impossible situation. And for some reason as the law stands now the best solution we have found is to pay people an unsustainable wage to take care of other people’s children with disabilities. While at the same time, rendering that care practically worthless through liability regulation and a complete lack of a vetting process.
I don't feel that little potties are necessary because I don't have them at home where my kids actually live. What matters more to me is no automatic anything, especially toilet flushers, and no loud hand dryers. Many normal toddlers find these things frightening.
Overall the point about efficiency is well taken, but "efficiency" comes off suffering in this piece, I think - it seems like a dirty word from the Lean Six Sigma realm. Which it definitely can be. But when it comes to any physical/manual task, including those in caregiving, oftentimes mastery means learning how to do the thing more efficiently. There's an efficiency that comes from mastery and one that comes from "labor saving." The second kind isn't even always illegitimate, but the distinction is still helpful, I think. Linger over cooking dinner with your kids, but not necessarily scrubbing the toilet - learn to do it as efficiently as you can.
Now, when it comes to *teaching these tasks to kids* is when things overlap. But you linger over the teaching, not necessarily the doing, so the child can, in turn, gradually become more efficient. I'm reading a book called Child Helpers right now. It's not a "parenting book" but an anthropological monograph. The upshot is that even young toddlers naturally want to be involved in the work they see going on around them. But when time and community are limited, opportunities for letting them "help" when they have no mastery are also limited, and their helping impulse is curbed. Then the parents are shocked when they don't want to do chores once they're older. The benefit of taking time over household tasks with kids present is so they can learn - not because efficiency isn't the goal. The analogy in workplace terms would be that it's less efficient in the long run to cut back on training new employees.
In the early twentieth century, industrial "motion study" and hygiene were applied to household tasks and home design, and this wasn't dehumanizing. (This is where the concept of the "food preparation triangle" came from, if I recall correctly.) Acknowledging the "labor and efficiency" components of housework can be acknowledging its dignity and necessity.
There are tiny toilets in a restroom station at our local zoo, in the area closest to the carousel and playground and petting zoo. Of the five or six stalls, one is the big ADA one, two or three are typical toilets, and two have tiny fixtures (with colorful seats no less! my oldest use to adore getting to use "da bwue one!"). (It occurs to me that I don't know if this is also the case on the men's side, not just the women's... surely, we'd hope??) The small toilet makes it viable for an adult to join a little inside the stall, too, with reasonable ease. At the sinks, half the counter is low-- between grown-up knee-and-hips height-- and thus two of the handwashing stations are reachable by small children without a boost.
Our church has two tiny toilet rooms, opening off a main hallway (i.e. not stashed away with access only through a preschool classroom). I would agree that otherwise, the tiny ones I've noticed have all been associated with defined preschool/childcare spaces.
I am a mostly-SAHM and while I enjoy it, there are definitely seasons where it is wearing. On a whim, I applied for a full time position and quickly got a job offer. It was a decent job with good benefits, but it just didn’t pay enough to substitute the unpaid work I do at home - particularly childcare, as even between my wage and my husband’s salary, we could not have afforded the childcare necessary for me to work full time. It’s not a particularly uplifting calculation, but it was clarifying.
In arguments against financially supporting SAHMs/parent care, I’ve seen the argument that it’s not “efficient.” I don’t think we should be trying to maximize cost efficiency in childcare, but I also wonder if that’s really true for the youngest children. Caring for a baby or toddler in formal childcare does allow for more children per adult than parent care (usually), but it also requires another building, administration, substitutes, cleaners, licensing specialists, duplicate supplies and furniture, etc. Add in paying childcare employees a higher-than-bottom-tier wage, and I wonder if the argument against supporting parent care is really that it’s “not efficient” or if people are uncomfortable acknowledging that caring for one’s own children isn’t just a private choice but has real benefits to wider society.
I don't think it means demanding efficiency. Our culture speaks the language of capital. Money and power. The demand for "wages for housework" is an attempt to make the invisible, visible, so it is less easy to exploit in secret, in the dark. Sentimentality about women's work has gotten us nowhere. The US so clearly despises the "weakness" of mothers and children, but hides it under loud lip service and sentimental gestures. It's like the clapping for "essential workers" during COVID - you cannot eat, sleep, or take shelter under appreciation. Childrearing costs money and time. Untoward delicacy about this fact does not serve mothers and children.
I remember as a child (in the early 90s!) that my local library had child-size toilets in the kids' section. That was definitely an intentional design, as the library was very large, and had a fantastic (and large!) children's section. It made sense that *of course* they would have child-size toilets and such, but come to think of it...I don't know that I've ever seen that anywhere else outside of daycares or schools.
I don't know that I've advocated for - aside from talking with others about - physical accommodations for a range of bodies, but I remember listening to Beth Silvers on the Pantsuit Politics podcast talk about how if we designed our community spaces for those with physical disabilities, the unintended consequences would benefit everyone. For example, putting in a ramp and a button to open a door not only helps someone in a wheel chair physically get into a space, but it also helps someone who is wheeling a stroller, someone delivering a large package or a full dolly to an office with their hands full, and on and on. I think about that conversation and that idea a lot, actually!
There's a way in which the college admissions process, and in particular the merit scholarship award cycle, offers non-monetary respect to young people who have great depth and breadth in service, leadership, and civic engagement. That is, unpaid labor given toward the public good. Which hits on the mixed-age aspect of your other question, too, since college applicants are in such a "cusp" zone of becoming adults and of situating themselves within their own emerging identity and place in society.
If we allow ourselves a little cynicism, of course, we might question whether all this activity and volunteerism, while amateur and not technically motivated by payment, isn't still commodified in terms of aspirations of access to "good" colleges and elite education and the subsequent benefits that they confer. But I do believe that many young people do earnestly engage with the world around them, receiving and accepting the message that it's important to give back, that chasing top grades in the academic rat race is not an end in itself; and that in general, our society validates and encourages this "service hours" or "well-roundedness" approach. (As well we should, in pursuit of a collaborative, dynamic, inclusive world that allows for interdependence on the path to human flourishing!)
But then, does the script flip at graduation, when gainful employment for good wages (or entrance into yet another good postgraduate program) is offered as the (only) marker of dignity and success? I'm imagining my 18yo self, filling out college applications, certain that her hours and hours of community contributions were lauded and valued by the culture that prompted her to pursue them in the first place (with an additional depth, I hope, anchored by my experiences in the church where service and mission and generosity were taught within the realm of spiritual practice in response to God's goodness, not just generic civic-mindedness). But what of those same high-school students-- earnestly accepting the world's cues to volunteer, intern, serve, lead, create, extend beyond self-- when we become parents wishing to donate our time and gifts to our children? We smart, involved, service-hour-logging college applicants aren't fundamentally different people five, ten, fifteen years later when a baby is on the way; but the respect accorded to group leadership, or service hours, or community improvement, probably still hinges on the benefit going to *public* groups, not *family* groups (or indirectly to the common good via the joy and stability of a family).
I like the toilet seats that include the option for a mini seat for children. I've seen them in many homes and a few public spaces on standard sized toilets. I also dig "soft close" lids.
The thing that often gets me in public bathrooms is the lack of step stools to access normal counter height for hand washing. A very few large, recently constructed bathrooms will include a lower sink, but a step stool is cheap, portable, and can accommodate many. I find it easier to hold a toddler over a standard toilet than I do holding them up at the sink and simultaneously assisting with hand washing, which in my experience is what they need help with longer, after mastering toileting.
To balance out my toilet comment, I recently felt so seen when I had to bring my 1-yo along to my 4-yo’s rather long & tedious optometrist appointment at a local childrens hospital. Every single exam room (we bounced among multiple) had a bead maze mounted on the wall in front of the chairs where the parent/guardians sit at exact toddler height. It was amazing. The multi-hour appointment was so much less stressful and exhausting than it would have been in a conventional room. I think half of it is just the relief that comes from a place designed for children. It’s a way in which good design silently announces that you, as a parent, don’t have to handle everything alone. Truly a balm when so many public spaces are designed to the exclusion of children (and often obnoxious inclusion of pets instead).
First, a caveat to my poll answer - my church has a tiny toilet, but only in the nursery, which is not open for every Mass. However, there is an accessible bathroom where the toilet and sink are lower than standard, so while nothing in that space is "tiny" it does facilitate independence.
Physical accommodations - as I think about this, I am surprised to find that our church is the best place I know of, after my daughter's Montessori school, which has an admitted bias towards being physically constructed for children. We have "Mass bags" that are placed on a child-sized rack, so children can get them and return them independently, we have power door openers on all external doors, we have a fully accessible sanctuary (though accessibility to the ambo and altar for those who cannot navigate steps is limited to a ramp at the rear of the sanctuary space), there are at least two designated spaces for wheelchair users within the pews, there are two drinking fountains at different heights, a step stool in the bathroom, our nursery is currently being turned into a sensory room with a live stream of Mass available to watch for anyone who is there, etc.
A book I can recommend on this issue is My Body is Not A Prayer Request by Dr. Amy Kenny. Among other things I learned, churches fought HARD against the passage of ADA, which I found disappointing but unfortunately not surprising.
> Where (at church or elsewhere) have you seen the needs of children incorporated in the physical design of a mixed-age space?
There’s a large coffee shop near us that has a corner with a couch, carpet, and shelf of kids’ toys and books. It’s designed in such a way that any noise and antics are a little bit sheltered from the rest of the space, and yet it’s very visible. It clearly signals, “Everyone is welcome here, including little kids.”
Our local library also has a small toilet in the kids’ section bathrooms, which is excellent.
I haven’t seen it in person, but I know of churches where there’s a soft play area at the back of the sanctuary where little kids and caregivers can “actively listen”.
> Is there a time when putting a money value on “unpaid work” help clarify a decision or get better treatment? How did you run the numbers?
This is more a symptom of my own capitalism-brain than anything else, but it sometimes helps when I feel glum about full-time SAHMing to do a little back-of-the-envelope math about the market “value” of my work. That’s not really how I should measure my worth, and yet...
I would love to see *any* public restroom that has a child-sized toilet. The most frustrating examples being “family” restrooms that don’t even have sinks a child could reach. I’ve yet to encounter a child-sizes potty that we don’t have to haul with us everywhere we go.
I worked for some time as a medicaid caretaker for a baby with Down Syndrome. I adore him and his family, but here is where would push back about paid family caretakers. His mom has been working very hard to change laws around paid caregiving in our area for children with disabilities. These children already all qualify for paid caregivers, but the current laws don’t allow parents to be the paid caregiver. Some families are lucky enough to have grandparents who can fill that role, or, like the family I worked for, a friend (me) who was between jobs. But they don’t pay enough for anything close to the level of consistent care a parent could and does provide. But because of the liability rules, caregivers cannot drive the children or perform any kind of “medical” care... including such things as putting on a CPAP mask or Gtube feeding, both things that are involved in the day-to-day routine care of some children with disabilities (and the boy I cared for). So how was I, who was not allowed to do a good deal of his routine care nor able to drive him to his various doctor’s appointments, supposed to truly care for him? Each time, his mom would still have to be there. That level of involvement basically prohibits her from having most jobs. But lower income families would be even more affected, since hourly workers are even less likely to have the flexibility needed to care for a child with disabilities. When I hear wages for parents, I think about this family and the freedom it would give them to care for their own child, without worrying about how they would put food on the table, a level of care which other caregivers simply cannot provide. Both because of the regulations and also because they just cannot provide the same kind and depth of care as parents. I think this conversation looks different when families have greater or varying needs, but in all cases, I wonder if the problem isn’t so much does paying parents render parenting a efficient and commercial activity, but how can we restructure our society so that parents can really BE parents, regardless of the various needs or circumstances they have. I know this boy’s mother would give anything to be able to stay home and care for her boy forever, but when you have to balance your time with your child and the draining resources, that creates an impossible situation. And for some reason as the law stands now the best solution we have found is to pay people an unsustainable wage to take care of other people’s children with disabilities. While at the same time, rendering that care practically worthless through liability regulation and a complete lack of a vetting process.
I don't feel that little potties are necessary because I don't have them at home where my kids actually live. What matters more to me is no automatic anything, especially toilet flushers, and no loud hand dryers. Many normal toddlers find these things frightening.
Overall the point about efficiency is well taken, but "efficiency" comes off suffering in this piece, I think - it seems like a dirty word from the Lean Six Sigma realm. Which it definitely can be. But when it comes to any physical/manual task, including those in caregiving, oftentimes mastery means learning how to do the thing more efficiently. There's an efficiency that comes from mastery and one that comes from "labor saving." The second kind isn't even always illegitimate, but the distinction is still helpful, I think. Linger over cooking dinner with your kids, but not necessarily scrubbing the toilet - learn to do it as efficiently as you can.
Now, when it comes to *teaching these tasks to kids* is when things overlap. But you linger over the teaching, not necessarily the doing, so the child can, in turn, gradually become more efficient. I'm reading a book called Child Helpers right now. It's not a "parenting book" but an anthropological monograph. The upshot is that even young toddlers naturally want to be involved in the work they see going on around them. But when time and community are limited, opportunities for letting them "help" when they have no mastery are also limited, and their helping impulse is curbed. Then the parents are shocked when they don't want to do chores once they're older. The benefit of taking time over household tasks with kids present is so they can learn - not because efficiency isn't the goal. The analogy in workplace terms would be that it's less efficient in the long run to cut back on training new employees.
In the early twentieth century, industrial "motion study" and hygiene were applied to household tasks and home design, and this wasn't dehumanizing. (This is where the concept of the "food preparation triangle" came from, if I recall correctly.) Acknowledging the "labor and efficiency" components of housework can be acknowledging its dignity and necessity.
There are tiny toilets in a restroom station at our local zoo, in the area closest to the carousel and playground and petting zoo. Of the five or six stalls, one is the big ADA one, two or three are typical toilets, and two have tiny fixtures (with colorful seats no less! my oldest use to adore getting to use "da bwue one!"). (It occurs to me that I don't know if this is also the case on the men's side, not just the women's... surely, we'd hope??) The small toilet makes it viable for an adult to join a little inside the stall, too, with reasonable ease. At the sinks, half the counter is low-- between grown-up knee-and-hips height-- and thus two of the handwashing stations are reachable by small children without a boost.
Our church has two tiny toilet rooms, opening off a main hallway (i.e. not stashed away with access only through a preschool classroom). I would agree that otherwise, the tiny ones I've noticed have all been associated with defined preschool/childcare spaces.
I am a mostly-SAHM and while I enjoy it, there are definitely seasons where it is wearing. On a whim, I applied for a full time position and quickly got a job offer. It was a decent job with good benefits, but it just didn’t pay enough to substitute the unpaid work I do at home - particularly childcare, as even between my wage and my husband’s salary, we could not have afforded the childcare necessary for me to work full time. It’s not a particularly uplifting calculation, but it was clarifying.
In arguments against financially supporting SAHMs/parent care, I’ve seen the argument that it’s not “efficient.” I don’t think we should be trying to maximize cost efficiency in childcare, but I also wonder if that’s really true for the youngest children. Caring for a baby or toddler in formal childcare does allow for more children per adult than parent care (usually), but it also requires another building, administration, substitutes, cleaners, licensing specialists, duplicate supplies and furniture, etc. Add in paying childcare employees a higher-than-bottom-tier wage, and I wonder if the argument against supporting parent care is really that it’s “not efficient” or if people are uncomfortable acknowledging that caring for one’s own children isn’t just a private choice but has real benefits to wider society.
I don't think it means demanding efficiency. Our culture speaks the language of capital. Money and power. The demand for "wages for housework" is an attempt to make the invisible, visible, so it is less easy to exploit in secret, in the dark. Sentimentality about women's work has gotten us nowhere. The US so clearly despises the "weakness" of mothers and children, but hides it under loud lip service and sentimental gestures. It's like the clapping for "essential workers" during COVID - you cannot eat, sleep, or take shelter under appreciation. Childrearing costs money and time. Untoward delicacy about this fact does not serve mothers and children.
I remember as a child (in the early 90s!) that my local library had child-size toilets in the kids' section. That was definitely an intentional design, as the library was very large, and had a fantastic (and large!) children's section. It made sense that *of course* they would have child-size toilets and such, but come to think of it...I don't know that I've ever seen that anywhere else outside of daycares or schools.
I don't know that I've advocated for - aside from talking with others about - physical accommodations for a range of bodies, but I remember listening to Beth Silvers on the Pantsuit Politics podcast talk about how if we designed our community spaces for those with physical disabilities, the unintended consequences would benefit everyone. For example, putting in a ramp and a button to open a door not only helps someone in a wheel chair physically get into a space, but it also helps someone who is wheeling a stroller, someone delivering a large package or a full dolly to an office with their hands full, and on and on. I think about that conversation and that idea a lot, actually!
There's a way in which the college admissions process, and in particular the merit scholarship award cycle, offers non-monetary respect to young people who have great depth and breadth in service, leadership, and civic engagement. That is, unpaid labor given toward the public good. Which hits on the mixed-age aspect of your other question, too, since college applicants are in such a "cusp" zone of becoming adults and of situating themselves within their own emerging identity and place in society.
If we allow ourselves a little cynicism, of course, we might question whether all this activity and volunteerism, while amateur and not technically motivated by payment, isn't still commodified in terms of aspirations of access to "good" colleges and elite education and the subsequent benefits that they confer. But I do believe that many young people do earnestly engage with the world around them, receiving and accepting the message that it's important to give back, that chasing top grades in the academic rat race is not an end in itself; and that in general, our society validates and encourages this "service hours" or "well-roundedness" approach. (As well we should, in pursuit of a collaborative, dynamic, inclusive world that allows for interdependence on the path to human flourishing!)
But then, does the script flip at graduation, when gainful employment for good wages (or entrance into yet another good postgraduate program) is offered as the (only) marker of dignity and success? I'm imagining my 18yo self, filling out college applications, certain that her hours and hours of community contributions were lauded and valued by the culture that prompted her to pursue them in the first place (with an additional depth, I hope, anchored by my experiences in the church where service and mission and generosity were taught within the realm of spiritual practice in response to God's goodness, not just generic civic-mindedness). But what of those same high-school students-- earnestly accepting the world's cues to volunteer, intern, serve, lead, create, extend beyond self-- when we become parents wishing to donate our time and gifts to our children? We smart, involved, service-hour-logging college applicants aren't fundamentally different people five, ten, fifteen years later when a baby is on the way; but the respect accorded to group leadership, or service hours, or community improvement, probably still hinges on the benefit going to *public* groups, not *family* groups (or indirectly to the common good via the joy and stability of a family).