Defecation and Toilet Training

Visitors to Summerhill must often get an odd impression about us, for sometimes we all talk about toilets. I think it is absolutely necessary to do so. I find that every child is interested in feces.

So much has been written about a child’s interest in his feces and urine that I expected to learn a lot by observing my infant daughter. However, she showed no interest at all nor any disgust. She had no desire to play with her body products. But when she was three, a friend of hers--a girl a year older who had been trained to be clean--introduced her to a hole-and-corner excrement game marked by much whispering and shame and guilty giggling. It was a tiresome game and we could do nothing about it, knowing that to interfere would be to risk inhibition. Luckily Zoe soon tired of the other little girl’s one-track activities and the feces game came to an end.

Adults seldom realize that there is nothing shocking to a child in feces and smells. It is the shocked attitude of the adult that makes the child conscience-stricken. I recall a girl of eleven who came to Summerhill. Her only interest in life was toilets. Her delight was to peep through the keyhole. I promptly changed her lessons from geography to toilets, making her very happy. After ten days, I made a remark about toilets. “Don’t want to hear about them,” she said wearily. “I’m fed up talking about toilets.”

Another pupil, a boy, could not take an interest in any lesson because he was so preoccupied with excrement and its likenesses. I knew that only when he had exhausted this interest would he be able to go on to mathematics. And so it was.

A teacher’s work is simple: find out where a child’s interest lies and help him to live it out. It is always so. Suppression and silence simply drive the interest underground.

“But won’t this method of yours make the children filthy minded?” asks Mrs. Morality.

“No, it is your method that permanently fixes an interest in what you call filth. Only when one has lived out an interest is one free to go on to something new.”

“Do you actually encourage children to talk about toilets?”

“Yes, when I find them interested in toilets. It is only in the more neurotic cases that the talking out takes more than a week.”

One such neurotic case occurred some year’s ago-We had a small boy sent to us because he messed his trousers all day long. His mother had thrashed him for it and, in desperation; she had finally made him eat his feces. You can imagine the problem we had to cope with. It turned out that this boy had a younger brother, and the trouble began with the birth of the younger child. The reason was obvious enough. The boy reasoned: He has taken Mommy’s love from me. If I am like him and mess my diapers, Mommy will love me again.

I gave him “private lessons” designed to reveal to him his true motive, but cures are seldom sudden and dramatic. For over a year, that boy messed himself three times daily. No one said a bitter word to him. Mrs. Corkhill, our nurse, performed the cleaning chores without a word of reproach. But she did protest when I began to reward him every time he made a really big mess. The reward meant that I was giving approval of his behavior.

During the entire period, the boy was a hateful little devil. No wonder! He had problems and conflicts. But after his cure he became absolutely clean and stayed with us three years. Eventually, he became a very lovable lad. His mother took him away from Summerhill on the grounds that she wanted a school where he would learn something. When he came back to see us after a year in the new school, he was a changed boy-insincere, afraid, unhappy. He said he would never forgive his mother for taking him away from Summerhill, and he never will. Strangely enough, he is the only example of trouser messing we have had in all these years. It may be that many such a case is one of hate against the mother for withholding her love.

It is possible to make a child clean without giving him a fixed and repressed interest in his bodily functions. The kitten and the calf seem to have no complex about excrement. The complex in the child comes from the manner of his instruction. When the mother says naughty or dirty or even tut-tut, the element of right and wrong arises. The question becomes a moral one- when it should remain a physical one.

Thus the wrong way to deal with a coprophilic child is to tell him he is being dirty. The right way is to allow him to live out his interest in excrement by providing him with mud or clay. In this way, he will sublimate his interest without repression. He will live through his interest; and in doing so, kill it.

Once, in a newspaper article, I mentioned a child’s right to make mud pies. A well-known Montessorian educator replied in a letter that his experience showed that a child did not want to make mud pies was given something better to do (the italics are mine). But there is nothing better to do when one’s interest is fixed in mud. However, the problem child must be told what he is doing, for it is possible to make mud pies for years without living out the original interest in excrement.

I recall Jim, an eight-year-old, who had fantasies about feces. I encouraged Jim to make mud pies. But all the time, I told him what he was really interested in. In this way, the process of curing was hurried along. I did not directly say, “You are doing this because it is a substitute for that.” I only reminded him of the similarity between the two elements. This worked. A younger child, say, about five, need not be told, as he would easily live out his fantasies merely in the making of mud pies.

To a child, excrement is a most important subject for study. Any suppression of this interest is dangerous and stupid. On the other hand, one should not attach too much importance to excrement, unless the child is proud of his production-in which case, admiration is in order. If a child makes a mess accidentally, it should be treated casually as something normal.

Defecation is not only a work of creation to a child, but is so to many adults as well. Adults often take pleasure and pride in the fact that they had a big movement. Symbolically, it is something of great value. A burglar who defecates on the carpet after robbing the safe does not intend to add insult to injury. He is symbolically showing his guilty conscience by leaving something of value to replace what he has stolen.

Animals are unconscious of natural functions. Dogs and cats that automatically cover their dung with earth are performing an instinctive act, which, far back, must have been necessary when food had to be kept clean. Man’s moral attitude toward his dung may have much to do with his unnatural diet. The dung of horses and sheep and rabbits is clean stuff and not at all disgusting. On the other hand, the excrement of man is disgusting because his food is such a nasty hash of artificial products. I have sometimes thought that if human excrement were as easy to touch as that of animals, children would stand a better chance of growing up with emotional freedom.

The disgust that adults have for human feces cannot help but play a great part in developing the negative, hate-forming part of the child’s psyche. Because nature has placed the excretory and the sexual organs close to each other, the child concludes that both are filthy. Therefore, parental disapproval of excrement will most certainly make the child regard sex in the same light. Thus, disapproval of sex and excrement forms one repression.

A mother may have no feeling of disgust when washing out her baby’s diapers. Three years later, however, she may show considerable annoyance when she has to wipe up a small pile from the carpet. Any mother should be very careful in dealing with the excrement situation, remembering that no emotional anger is ever lost on a baby. It sinks in and stays, and is registered in the character.

Food

Totalitarianism began, and totalitarianism still begins in the nursery. The first interfering with child nature is despotism. That first interference is always in the matter of food. It starts with forcing the newborn child to fast and to feed according to a timetable.

The surface explanation for this is that timetable feeding interferes less with the daily routine and the comfort of adults. But deep down, the real motive is hatred of newborn life and its natural needs. This is seen in the indifference and care with which certain families sometimes listen to the screams of the hungry baby.

Self-regulation should begin with birth, with the very first feedings. Every baby has the birthright of being fed when it wants to be fed. It is easy for the mother to give the infant its way if the mother has the baby at home. But in most hospital maternity wards, the baby is taken away from the mother at birth and placed in a nursery ward. The mother is not allowed to nurse it or give it a bottle for the first twenty-four hours. Who can say what permanent damage is done to that baby?

In some hospitals today, rooming-in care is provided so that the infant is with the mother and under her personal care during her entire stay. Registering in a maternity ward without first making sure of this means that one must accept the system as it is. Any mother who means to use self-regulation for her baby should beware of going into a hospital that does not provide rooming-in care--in other words, that does not approve of self- regulation for the infant. It is far better to have your baby at home than to subject it to such cruelty.

Timetable feeding by the system of doctors and nurses, has been attacked so effectively that many practitioners have given it up. It is obviously wrong and dangerous. If a child is crying from hunger at four o’clock but is not fed until the time indicated by a chart, he is being subjected to a stupid, cruel, anti-life discipline of infinite harm to his bodily and spiritual growth. Baby must feed when he wants to feed. In the beginning, his wants will be frequent, for he cannot absorb large quantities at a time.

The practice of giving baby a bottle of water at night is a bad one. During the night, if it is hungry, the baby should be fed as usual. After two or three months, the baby will regulate itself to larger quantities of food, and there will be longer intervals between each feeding. At the age of about three or four months, the baby will want to be fed, say, between ten and eleven at night and between five and six the next morning. There is of course, no hard and fast rule about this.

One fundamental truth should be written out in every nursery: Baby must not be allowed to cry himself out. His needs must be attended to every time.

With timetable training, the mother is always a few steps ahead of the baby. Like an efficiency expert, she will know exactly what to do next. But she will be rearing a mechanical baby, a molded baby. Such a baby will, of course, give minimum trouble to adults--at the cost of its own natural development. But with self-regulation for the baby, every day-every minute-means a new discovery for the mother. For then, mother is always a step behind the baby, and learning by intimate observation all the time. Thus if a baby cries a half-hour after a good feeding, the young mother will have to think the problem out for herself, regardless of what the timetable mechanists say about it. Is he uncomfortable? Is he suffering from gas in the stomach? Or does he want more food? Does he just want attention because he feels lonely? The mother should react with her spontaneous love, not with any wretched rule out of some book.

Every baby will, if left to itself, evolve its own timetable. This means that a baby has the capacity for self-regulation, not only in milk feeding, but later on in solid feeding.

Thumb sucking in later childhood, often continuing into adolescence is the most obvious result of timetable feeding. Sucking has two components: the hunger for food, and the sensual joy in sucking. When feeding time comes, there is a rush of oral pleasure, which is satisfied before the hunger. If the baby has to scream and wait because the clock says he isn’t hungry, both components become dammed up.

I have seen a mother in a maternity ward; acting upon the instruction of a doctor, snatch the baby from the breast because the clock said that the baby had had its allotted minutes to feed. I can think of no more effective way to produce a problem child.

It is almost incredible that ignorant doctors and parents should dare to interfere with a baby’s natural impulses and behavior, destroying joy and spontaneity with their absurd ideas of guiding and molding. It is people like these who begin the universal sickness of mankind, both psychic and somatic. Later, school and church continue the process of disciplinary education that is anti-pleasure and anti-freedom.

One mother wrote about her small boy who was self-regulated: When he started eating solid foods, he was, for instance, offered his choice of foods and the amounts he would take. If he refused a certain kind of vegetable, he would either be given another vegetable or he might even be given his dessert. Very often, he would eat the refused vegetable after he had eaten his dessert. Sometimes he would refuse to eat anything--a sure sign that he was not hungry. Then at his next meal, he would eat particularly well.

All too often, a mother thinks that she knows what her child needs better than the child knows. This just isn’t so. This fact about child feeding is easily tested. Any mother can set out on a table ice cream, candy, whole-wheat bread, tomatoes, lettuce, and other foods, and then allow the child complete freedom to choose what he wants. The average child, if not interfered with, will select a balanced diet in just about a week. I understand that this fact has also been borne out in controlled experiments conducted in the United States.

In Summerhill, we always give even the smallest child complete freedom to choose from the daily menu. There is always a choice of three main-course dishes at dinner. One result is, of course, that there is less waste at Summerhill than at most schools. But that is not our motive, for we want to save the child rather than the food.

When children are fed a balanced diet, the candy they buy with their pocket money does no harm. Children like candy became their bodies crave sugar, and sugar they should have.

To compel a child to eat bacon and eggs when he hates bacon and eggs is absurd and cruel. Zoe has always been allowed to choose what she wanted to eat. Whenever she had a cold, she ate only fruit and drank only fruit juices without any suggestion on our part. I never before had seen a child who had so little interest in eating as Zoe. A bag of chocolates could sit on her table for days without being touched, and the most delectable dish at lunch or supper would often leave her indifferent. If she sat down to breakfast and another child shouted from outside to come and play, she always left her food and never came back to eat it. But as her physique was always excellent, we had nothing to worry about.

Naturally, most parents will plan a menu according to their own pet ideas about diet. If parents are vegetarians, they will give their children vegetarian meals. I often notice, however, that children from vegetarian homes wolf meat portions with great gusto.

As a layman unskilled in dietetics I am of the opinion that it does not matter whether a child is a meat eater or not As long as his diet is balanced, his health is likely to be good. I never hear of diarrhea in Summerhill, and seldom of constipation. We always have lots of raw greens, but sometimes-new children refuse to eat them. Usually, in the course of time, pupils accept them and get to like them. At any rate, Summerhill children are mostly unconscious of the cuisine, which is as it should be.

Because eating provides a great deal of pleasure in childhood, it is too fundamental, too vital, to be marred by table manners. The sad truth is that the children in Summerhill who have the worst table manners are those who have been brought up very genteelly. The more demanding and rigid the home, the worse the table manners and all other manners--once the child is given the freedom to be himself. There is nothing to do but to let the child live out the repressed tendency until he develops his own natural good manners later on in adolescence.

Food is the most important thing in a child’s life, much more important than sex. The stomach is egocentric and selfish. Egoism belongs to childhood. The boy of ten is far more possessive about his plate of mutton than the old tribal chief was about his women. When the child is allowed freedom to live out his egoism as he does at Summerhill, this egoism gradually becomes altruism and natural concern for others.

Health and Sleep

In thirty-eight years at Summerhill, we have had very little sickness. I think the reason is that we are on the side of the living process for we approve of the flesh. We put happiness before diet. Visitors to Summerhill generally remark on how well fed the children look. I think it is happiness that makes our girls look attractive and our boys handsome.

Eating raw greens may play an important part in curing kidney disease. But all the greens in the world won’t affect the sickness of the soul if that sickness is due to repression. A man who eats a balanced diet can warp his children by moralizing, whereas a non-neurotic man will not harm his offspring. My experience leads me to conclude that warped children are less healthy physically than free children.

Incidentally, I note that many of our boys at Summerhill grow up to be six footers, even when their parents are comparatively short. There may be nothing in it; then again, it may be that freedom to grow in grace also means freedom to grow in inches. Certainly, I have seen boys grow more rapidly after the masturbation prohibition has been removed.

Then there is the question of sleep. I wonder how much truth there is in the dictum of doctors that so and so much sleep is necessary for a child. With small children, yes. Allow a child of seven to sit up late at night, and he suffers in health because he often cannot go on sleeping late in the morning. Some children resent being sent to bed because they feel they will be missing something.

In a free school, bedtime is the very devil--not with the juniors so much as with the seniors. Youth likes to burn the mid-night oil, and I can sympathize, for I hate to go to bed myself.

Work settles the problem for most adults. If you have to be in your job at 8 A.M., you renounce the temptation to stay up until the small hours.

Other factors such as happiness and good food, may balance any loss of sleep. Summerhill pupils make up their loss of sleep on Sunday mornings, preferring to miss lunch if need be.

As for work in relation to health, much of the work I do has a dual motive. I dig for potatoes, realizing that I could use the time more profitably if I wrote newspaper articles and paid a laborer to dig in the garden. However, I dig because I want to keep healthy--a motive that is more important to me than newspaper dollars. A friend, who is a car dealer, tells me what a fool I am to dig in an age of mechanics, and I tell him that motors are ruining the health of the nation because no one walks or digs nowadays. He and I are old enough to be conscious of health problems

A child, however, is completely unconscious of health. No boy digs in order to keep fit. In any work, he has only a single motive - his interest at the time.

The good health that we enjoy at Summerhill is due to freedom, good food, and fresh air--in that order.

Date: 2015-12-11; view: 627