What is it with little kids and the bathroom talk? Today at the kiddie pool little children four three and four years old were calling each other ‘toilet-face’. It was toilet face this, toilet-face that, toilet-face chanted antiphonally from one shore to the other. The sounds rang across the water, call and response, like a naughty version Marco Polo.
I blame “Shrek” and such movies with their dumb flatulence jokes, the movie-makers’ attempt to seem ‘edgy’ and ‘adult’ to the small people in the General Audience seats of the Cineplex. I got all on my high horse about it – ‘til one little kids said to another “You Tampax!” and I had trouble not laughing right out loud. Lucky for us all, one veteran mom cradling an infant suddenly turned from the friend she was conversing with and said “Hey! Enough with the with the bathroom talk!”and that wiped the smile off all our faces.
I guess you can’t really blame the kids; it’s what they do, take some private, shameful-seeming thing in their own world and direct the heat of it onto somebody else in order to mock and target them. It’s just an attempt to get the focus off themselves I know but Gad what an ugly human trait it is. I recall my little first-grader coming home from school to report that her best friend got the other children to make a circle around her, and with pointing fingers chant “Baby wets her P-a-a-a-nts, Baby wets Her Pa-a-a-nts” never mind that she had not done that ever not even once.
How do we get them to stop? Not to say my own children were all blameless little Gandhis but here’s something my son did once at the middle school lunch table. He was the funny one with the twinkle in his eye, which is maybe why one of the boys suddenly said, “Mike, quick! Go squish your juice-box on that kid’s head!” Michael looked over at the would-be victim and back again at his pals and said in the mild voice he still uses with his family when he things we’re acting like chumps, “How ‘bout this? How ‘bout I squish it on my own head and tell you what it feels like?”
I remember slamming the steering wheel with the flat of my hand in my enthusiasm when he told me this story in the car after school. “Good for you Michael! Oh, GOOD for you!” Maybe we all just need more observers in our lives; some to call on us on it when we misbehave, like mom with the baby, and some to praise and notice when we do sometimes get it right.
EXIT ONLY 