Child of the 70's, Part 3: This is Why We Now Wear Helmets

One time when my sister and I were about eight, my family was playing pond hockey down the road from our house and my dad (he was a little competitive) accidentally knocked my sister down flat on the ice.  Since no one was wearing a helmet (my dad’s sole protection consisted of  my mom's square, white gardening knee-pads, which he tied to his legs with clothesline), my sister nailed her head pretty hard when she fell. Dad was absolutely horrified, Mantha was nauseous, and the game was over. Mom was happy for any excuse to pack up and go home, as it was like four degrees out and snowing. We all sat down to take off our skates.  Samantha was fumbling confusedly with her laces, so my dad untied them for her, put her boots back on, and gently hoisted her to her feet. Then he went to warm up the van.

My sister held on to my arm as we walked through the snow to the van. Getting in the van, she seemed unable to locate the door handle--she kept grabbing the side of the van in the wrong place. Finally (I guess it did not occur to me to open the door for her!)  she said, “Jesseca, I can’t see.” 

I thought about this for a second and responded, “Really?” 

She said, “Yeah.” 

“Huh,” I said. 

I opened the heavy sliding van door (this was 1979!) and guided my twin into a seat. Meanwhile, our parents loaded up the hockey nets, Thermoses  of hot cocoa, and canoe cushions we used to sit on in the snow. On the 2 minute drive home, my sister stared straight ahead.

“Can you see yet?” I whispered. 

“No,” she whispered back. 

For some reason we had no inclination to tell our parents she had been blinded. Nor did we ever consider that this might be an actual medical emergency! We did not, in my family, go to the ER--ever. Even when my dad cut his thigh open with a chainsaw, all he said was, "Tell your mother to bring me a towel." (The one and only ER visit of my childhood occurred when my mom sliced her Achilles tendon by kicking a trash bag with a broken wine glass in it, and even then, she only went because my aunt, who is a nurse, was there and made her.) 

When we pulled in the driveway, Samantha  still couldn't see,  so I held her elbow and steered her inside to the couch. She promptly started puking, which she continued to do for a good two hours. My mom mused that she  must have “hit the throw up spot,” and went to make dinner.  Some point that evening--which I recall as being really boring, because my sister couldn't do anything, being both pre-occupied with vomiting and blind--she regained her sight. My mom probably did call our pediatrician, Dr. Pitelli (in those days, she could call her at home!) who, not knowing about the blindness, probably said to just let her get a good night's sleep. 

Years later, we told my parents about this, and they were absolutely astonished.  My sister, by then an internal medicine physician,  mused that she had probably cracked her skull. My dad felt awful all over again for  knocking her down. My mom just said, “Huh.” 

Now, when my sons play hockey, it takes them twenty minutes to put on everything from what they call their "nut protector" to their neck guard. (We also have to sign nine pages of waivers,  including  statements like "Parents will not drop objects over the glass onto the bench of the opposing team," before they can get on the ice.) I have to confess that by March, I find the whole hockey thing just a wee bit wearisome, and wish my kids were only playing on a pond across the street. But I am sure am grateful for the helmets. 

Cafeteria Food

My last post got me thinking about the evolution of school lunches. 

When Farmer Boy went to school, his older sister, Eliza Jane, carried a lunch pail for the four Wilder children to share. After trudging several miles through the snow (there were always three feet of snow and subzero temperatures when the Wilder children walked to school)  and then sitting in dead silence all morning in a one-room school heated only by a woodstove, I am sure Almanzo and his siblings were starving by lunch time--particularly since--Mother's epic breakfasts notwithstanding!-- they had all been up since 4:30 a.m chasing cows around to keep them from freezing to death. 

Eliza Jane opened the dinner pail on her desk. It held bread-and-butter and sausage, doughnuts and apples, and four delicious apple turnovers, their plump crusts filled with melting slices of apple and spicy brown juice. After Almanzo had eaten every crumb of his turnover and licked his fingers, he took a drink of water from the pail, and went out to play. 

Almanzo's mom not only baked the bread and made the apple turnovers and the sausage, the family grew the apples and the wheat, raised the cows, chickens, and pigs, churned the butter, and harvested their own sugar from sugar maples. Almanzo's mom was not worried about the sugar, gluten, fat, or carbs--she was worried about the kids not falling down in the snow and freezing solid on the way home--and then getting through an hour or so of chores before supper.

My elementary school was an old brown building (called, for obvious reasons, "The Brown Building") with beautiful, high-ceilinged classrooms, grand creaky staircases with bowling-ball sized newel posts, and a cafeteria in the basement. This cafeteria was low-ceilinged and gloomy, with concrete floors and lumpy stone walls that were whitewashed and painted cheerily with large pieces of fruit--possibly aimed to distract us from the fact that we were eating lunch in a damp, cold, dark, 19th century basement. ("We are eating in a damp, gloomy--oh look, there's four foot high pear!") Every once in a while, a dodgeball would fly into one of the deep window wells, and someone on the playground would have to hop down and ferret it out--reminding us that we, too, would soon be back out in the fresh air!

Every day before lunch, our teacher would herd us into a windowless little room at the bottom of the stairs and leave us there, closing the massive steel door behind her. The room was lit only by one sad little Soviet-prison style light bulb covered with cobwebs. We would peer at each other in the gloom, some of us wondering--is this the day they forget about us and leave us down here to die?

Worst of all, this dark, creepy little holding pen was adjacent to the kitchen's industrial dishwasher, and every day,  the room would slowly fill up with the scent of hot, garbage-laden bilgewater.  (Just writing about it makes me nauseous, forty years later!) After what seemed like an hour (it was probably not more than ten minutes, but that is a very long time when a) you think you have been abandoned in a basement to die, or b) you are trying really hard not to throw up), the lunch teacher would finally open the other door and let us in the cafeteria.

For this reason, in 12 years of school, I never bought anything hot from the cafeteria. (By senior in high school I could manage a bag of pretzels, if I got through the line quickly. Any scent of bilgewater and I would have to ditch the pretzels and run.) ) Ironically, in those days, the lunch ladies still actually cooked. They started with actual meat and flour and vegetables and made Turkey Tettrazini or American Chopsuey from scratch. It was probably a lot closer to Farmer Boy's lunch than what must have been the all-time low  of school lunches, the 1990's (when as I have already mentioned, many districts farmed their lunch service out to fast food chains).

Today, thankfully, we have gone full circle with "Farm to Table" and school gardening programs. How Farmer Boy's mom would have laughed--or maybe cried-- that we have to teach kids where food actually comes from.

Child of the 70's 2: The Lunch Thief

When my sister and I were in the 7th grade, someone started stealing lunches from our group of friends. Before long, one of us was missing her entire lunch every day.  If this wasn't bad enough, when the thief saw my sister's usual  lunch--which usually consisted of four slabs of high-fiber Wasa bread which had gone soft under a layer of  Port Wine cheese--he just threw it on the floor in disgust, leaving it to be trampled into crumbs!

We were beside ourselves. Every time a lunch disappeared (or was smashed on the floor) we had to share the four lunches we still had among six of us--so we all went  hungry. And, unlike some seventh grade girls I could mention, who wore fashionable mini-dresses and had feathered hair and boyfriends--we all had braces and pigtails, were very passionate about our stuffed animals,  and really, really liked to eat. My  67-lb sister could eat 12 tacos at one sitting. Helen could put away a box of Fudge Stripes every day after school. I considered a whole bag of potato chips with a container of sour cream a healthy snack, and  Emily, who weighed even less than my sister, could go through a gallon of ice cream in one slumber party. Our parents used to wonder about parasitic worms. 

The thief definitely did not target us for our high-quality lunches, either--the ones he stole were only fractionally better than the Wasa bread and port wine cheese. We all had feminist '70s moms: they loathed housework, cooking,  and shopping, and  they made us pack our own lunches starting in like,  first grade.   My mom gave us week-old leftover chicken legs, which sometimes made me throw up; Montana’s mom was experimenting with algae; Helen’s parents were in the middle of a divorce, so she usually had cold pizza; Amy usually had a Thermos of macrobiotic tofu casserole, and Emily brought the same PB & J every day.  

A few weeks after our food started disappearing, everyone's lunch (except Samantha's!) was gone on the same day. We were miserably sharing four soggy Wasa Bread and Port Wine cheese slabs among six people (even though they had been stepped on) when Helen dropped her tiny portion of Wasa Bread and gasped: 

“Oh my god!  Garret Smith is eating my sandwich!” 

She knew it was her sandwich, because her mom had just made spelt bread, and the inside was sprouts and leftover turkey pot pie. Despite the fact that Garrett was nearly six feet tall in the seventh grade, shaved, and wore all black leather, Helen (she had guts!) walked up right up to him and said, 

“Hey! That’s my spelt bread, spouts and leftover turkey pot pie sandwich!” 

 “No dude, it’s mine,” said Garrett.

“Oh, really? What kind of bread is it then?” demanded Helen, her hands on her hips.

“It’s my f***g bread!” said Garrett, while all his friends laughed. “Now f*** off!” He swallowed the last of the sandwich, smirked at her, got up from the table, and sauntered away.  

Helen stormed back to our lunch table: “That ***hole is eating my spelt bread, spouts and leftover turkey pot pie sandwich, and he told me to f*** off!”

“By the way,” she added, looking at Manth and I, “I think one of his friends had one of your mom’s chicken legs!”

We were furious! Aghast! Livid! Not only was this  jerk stealing our food and handing it out--he was eating it right in front of us! He could care less if we knew it was him. This would never happen to the popular girls. 

We came up with a plan: we would booby trap our lunches with food so disgusting that Garrett would never steal our of our lockers again. We went from house to house (except Emily’s, whose mom had permanently banned us from her kitchen after that unfortunate ice-cream-and-steak-knife incident). Amy had the weirdest stuff in her kitchen: mysterious Asian hot sauces and fish past and creepy frozen stuff her mom kept in ice trays in the freezer (which turned out to be homemade pesto and was probably delicious), and Montana’s mom had stashes of algae and tofu.

Helen’s mom had nine cats.  

On Monday, we each left a fish paste, hot sauce and cat food sandwich in our lunch bag, cunningly surrounded by normal food like Fudge Stripes and granola bars.  Now that we knew who the thief was, we kept on alert for any sign of him--but he normally ate outside  in the smoking area (it was 1982).

At lunch on Monday, the booby-trapped lunches were gone, right on schedule. We retrieved  our real lunches from deep inside our book bags, where they were flattened but intact (room temperature chicken legs never looked so good!) 

It only took one round of cat food sandwiches, and our food never disappeared again.

We never once considered telling an adult. 

If this happened now--there would be emails! Meetings with mental health professionals!  New school policies concerning booby-trapped sandwiches and allergies! Probably Garrett’s parents would have sued us for feeding him cat food and fish paste, and we would have all gotten detention for bullying. 

I don’t think any of us ever considered the idea that Garrett  (not his real name) stole our lunches because he was actually hungry. If we had told someone, maybe he could have been set up with a school lunch account if he didn’t have one. But no one really fell through the cracks in our tiny little school--I am willing to bet that Garrett was probably was eligible for school lunch; and probably even had an account--but that he preferred to steal, so he could eat in the smoking area.  I could be wrong. I'll never know. 

At least our little group tried to teach him it’s wrong to steal--even from geeks. 

Cell Phones and Children, Part 2

One day, driving back from a zoo in rural Oklahoma, I spotted what looked like three small children sitting on the edge of a state highway. It was a two lane road, on a long flat stretch way out in the country--semitrailers were roaring by at 80 miles an hour. I glanced back and didn't see a car, or any sign of an adult. I looked again in the rearview mirror and finally pulled over, hundreds of yards past where the kids were huddled together--three of them, their  heads bent, staring at their feet. I backed up in the breakdown lane as carefully as I could while my boys were freaking out, yelling MOM WHAT ARE YOU DOING MOM WHAT ARE YOU DOING WHAT ARE YOU DOING???

After pulling as far from the road as I could, I got out of the car and approached the three children. The oldest, I swear, was no more than five years old. The other two looked about two and three. They stared at me with big eyes, terrified.

The oldest boy was gripping a cell phone in his hand.

"Hi, " I said, keeling down. "I'm a mom --I have my kids in the car--they are about your age. We just went to the zoo." I pointed to my boys, who were hanging their heads out the window staring. The kids said nothing.

"You guys should not be out here by yourself," I said, as another tractor-trailer whizzed by just a few feet away. "Where do you live?" (teaching public school had taught me not to ask "Where's your mom" without getting more information.)

"Down there," said the oldest boy, gesturing toward a deep ditch and an impenetrable hedge of vines and barbed wire. I couldn't see where they had gotten through, or any houses.

The little boy held up his cell phone.

"Our dad said he won't come get us. He said if we got lost, we can find our own way back."

"Well, can you call him again? You can't stay here."

The little boy dialed again. I could hear a voice barking on the other end.

"He's not coming," the boy said again. His little brother and sister looked utterly dejected. I peered again at the hedge. Not too far down the road, I could see a road that curved back toward this way--maybe it would lead to their house.

We waited. More trucks went by and the ground shook. Most were going so fast they didn't even notice our odd little group. I looked at the little boy clutching his phone, his tiny brother and sister each gripping an arm.

"You can't stay here," I said again. "It's too dangerous. It's dangerous for my kids to be sitting in my car up there. If I drove you, could you show me where you house is?"

At this the poor kids looked absolutely petrified. At least someone had told them not to ride with strangers--but what a joke--they maybe weighed 50 lbs all together! I could have wrestled them all into my car--but only at the risk of frightening them to death, getting bitten, or by the looks of these poor kids, getting arrested for kidnapping at the request of some seriously scary-ass redneck dad when I did get them home.  As for that cell phone keeping them safe--all I would have had to do was take it out of the little guy's hand.

We waited. After maybe fifteen minutes, I had finally decided to call the police to come get them when I heard a man shouting from other side of the ditch. One massive red forearm punched through the bramble hedge, pushing down a strand of barbed wire. A face appeared under a tattered baseball cap. There were teeth missing, and tattoos. It was the dad. He yelled something incomprehensible at the kids. I gave him the nastiest look I could. Then I bent down and to the oldest boy.

"Listen, " I said, "You can't ever come back here. Don't ever come near this road again--okay? Next time, it might not be a mom who stops--anyone could have picked you up. Do you understand?" He stared at me and nodded seriously.

His dad, trapped in the hedge, yelled something that sounded like "Frickin dagnabbit y'all!"  I stood up. The three kids scampered for the opening in the hedge. I watched them climb over the barbed wire and disappear. The dad didn't give me a backward glance.

I thought, You're welcome! You total disgrace to Oklahoma fatherhood! 

Letting three preschoolers go free range with a cell phone!

I got back in my car. My boys were silent. I did not normally pull off the highway and confront abandoned children. All I could say the whole ride home was "Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God."

Palmer finally said, "Mom! Why do you keep saying that?"

I tried to explain. They glazed over at "Parents really should never...."

I promised myself I would try to teach my kids sense instead of cell phone skills. Whether or not I have succeeded-- the jury is still out. If anyone sees my kids on the side of a highway, please let me know.

If Farmer Boy Had a Cell Phone

One day--several years ago, in another state--I was standing at my kitchen sink, looking out the window, when a kid from the neighborhood, "Billy," rode by on his bike. He was riding in typical 10-year-old-on-a-perfectly-flat-street style: he was pedaling standing up and pumping as hard as humanly possibly, so that his bike jerked madly from side to side.

Then, wham, he hit something (maybe a tumbleweed, or a dead armadillo, or a tarantula) and wiped out. He flew off his bike and lay stunned in the street. He seemed perfectly fine, other than being surprised.  I watched him, thinking: Heavens to Murgatroyde, kid, get out of the street! But instead of a) pushing his bike off of himself, or b) getting out of the street, Billy fumbled in his sweatshirt for his phone. He then appeared to call several different numbers before finally reaching his mom.

All this while he was sprawled in the street, with his bike still lying on top of him.

After talking to his mom for  about two seconds, Billy sprang up and dragged his bike out of the street (obviously her first question was "Are you still lying in the road?"). After hauling his bike to the curb, Billy called his mom back to see what he should do next. (He was all of two blocks from home!) Apparently, Mom wisely instructed him to just get back on his bike and keep going, which he did,  after carefully zipping his cell phone back into his pocket.

Farmer Boy's dad would have walked away in disgust and left Billy to get run over by a minivan.

When Farmer Boy was eight--eight!--he had to learn to haul logs with his own little bobsled, driving the two oxen he had trained himself over many long winter hours in the barn. His dad's method of teaching him to haul wood was sending him out with the the bobsled, the oxen, and two French kids  for a whole day to figure it out.

Pierre and Louis rolled the log an inch, then Almanzo stuck his pole under it and held it, while Pierre and Louis rolled it again. They got the log high up on the steep skids. 

Almanzo was holding it with all his might. His legs were braced and his teeth were clenched and his neck strained and his eyes felt bulging out, when suddenly the whole log slipped. 

The pole jerked out of his hands and hit his head. The log was falling on him. He tried to get away, but it smashed him down into the snow. Pierre and Louis screamed and kept screaming. Almanzo couldn't get up. The log was on top of him. Father and John lifted it, and Almamzo crawled out. He managed to get up on his feet. 

"Hurt, son?" Father asked him. 

Almanzo was afraid he was going to be sick at his stomach. He managed to say, "No, Father...."

"Accidents will happen, son," Father said, "Take more care next time. Men must look out for themselves in the timber." 

Billy would have whipped out his phone, called his mom and said "I'm under a log!" before he was slowly crushed to death. Father Wilder would have probably just shaken his head and said, "Guess he wasn't meant to be."

Next week: Cell phones, part 2: the time I found three children under 5 and a cell phone on the side of a state highway. 

Farmer Boy Meets Wrath of Khan

Several years ago, my family watched “Star Trek, Wrath of Khan”—the one where the evil Khan puts carnivorous leeches in the ears of his prisoners, and they crawl in and eat the prisoner’s brains! This was possibly a little too scary for my kids, because the next day in school, my older son, age 10, announced that he was going to make a new weapon out of snails and jello, and was planning to bring it to school the next day, in a baggie. 

My poor kid. He was thinking about brain eating alien leeches wielded by Ricardo Montalban in a leather thong, and the schools are dealing with assault weapons. Thus, five minutes later,  he was suspended for  using the word  "weapon."  It is really sad that our teachers and administrators are no longer permitted to use their own common sense, such as teaching kids to identify things that are an actual threat to their safety, and things that are, in all likelihood, not. Snails and jello together in a baggie—unless I am just hopelessly behind the times!—fall into this category.

Farmer Boy was faced with a very real threat at school, and the way the adults coped with it was something he remembered  for the rest of his life: 

Five big boys were scuffling in the snow by the the path. Almanzo was frightened when he saw them…They were the big boys from Hardscrabble Settlement, and everybody was afraid of them. These big boys were sixteen and seventeen years old, and they came to school only in the middle of the winter term. The came to thrash the teacher and break up school. They boasted that no teacher could finish winter term in that school, and no teacher ever had….Almanzo felt sick when he thought about how to big boys would beat Mr. Corse. 

After school, Mr. Corse comes home with Almanzo and his brother and sisters to take his turn boarding at the Wilder’s . Almanzo’s father tells Mr. Corse that the previous winter, the teacher, Jonas Lane, had later died as a result of the beating he received from the five boys from Hardscrabble Settlement. Mr. Corse says, “I know. Jonas Lane was my friend.” 

The next day at school, the big boys make their move on  Mr. Corse:

The door banged pen, and Big Bill Ritchie swaggered in. The other big boys were behind him. 

“Come on, boys!” He rushed up the aisle. Almanzo felt sick inside; he didn’t want to watch, but he couldn’t help it….Mr Corse stepped away from his desk. His hand came from behind the desk lid, and a long, thin, black streak hissed through the air. It was a blacksnake ox-whip, fifteen feet long. Mr Corse held the short handle, loaded with iron, that could kill an ox. The thin, long lash coiled around Bill’s legs, and Mr. Corse jerked. Bill lurched and almost fell. Quick as black lightning the lash jerked and circled and struck and coiled again, and again Mr. Corse jerked…Bill’s trousers were cut through, his shirt was slashed, and his arms were bleeding from the bite of the lash. He began to bawl like a calf. He blubbered and begged. ….The other big boys had got the window open. One, two, three, they jumped out into the deep snow and floundered away. 

That night at supper, Almanzo’s father says:

“The boys didn’t throw you out, Royal tells me,” 

“No,” said Mr. Corse, “Thanks to your blacksnake whip.”

Almanzo stopped eating. He sat and looked at Father. Father had known, all the time. Almamzo was sure that father was the smartest man in the world, as well as the biggest and strongest. 

I don’t really wish my kids were going to school in the 1880’s—pre anti-biotics, vaccines, and child labor laws. But I do wish they could witness a little more common sense.

Child of the 70's, Part 1: The Sad School Bus

On the first day of first grade, my mom waited at the bus stop with my twin sister and me, took pictures, saw us onto the bus, and waved us off with a very big smile on her face (she already had her tennis skirt on).   My sister and I climbed on the bus and sat together, which is what twins do. There was no one else on the bus, as we were the first stop.  A little ways down the road some older girls—third graders!—got on, and immediately started to make fun of us for sitting together!  Apparently this was not at all cool! Unbeknownst to us bus rookies, apparently, siblings were not supposed to acknowledge each other on the bus, unless by throwing things. 

To our great shock and horror, our very first bus ride to school turned into 45 minutes of unrelenting hair pulling, poking, pinching, insults to our lunch boxes —“Holly Hobbie stinks!” —and, despite the fact that we were huddled miserably in the seat, just trying to be invisible, and not exhibiting, either of us,  any signs of an inflated ego—we got hit with the ultimate insult among grade school girls: “You think you’re so great!” 

After a few weeks of this, Mantha and I stood dejectedly at the bus stop, considering our options. The torture showed no signs of slowing. Sitting apart wouldn’t help—we were already pegged as fair game on the bus. (After the first morning, Mom did not even walk up the driveway with us—she had no idea we how much we hated the bus. We both knew what she would say if we told her—“Oh girls, for pete’s sake, you’ll be fine!”) 

Manth said, “We could walk.”

I said, “Mom would be mad.”

Manth said, “She won’t find out.”

(We definitely weren’t worried about Dad finding out—Dad was at work, commuting 40 miles each way, and this being the 70’s, probably never set foot in the school until the Christmas concert.) 

It was decided. Giddy with relief, we picked up our hand-sewn book bags and our Holly Hobbie lunch boxes, and we headed down the road toward the school, about 3/4 of a mile away. When the bus came roaring up the hill a few minutes later, we darted nimbly into the woods and hid under the stone wall until the coast was clear (much like the four hobbits in the beginning of the first Lord of Rings movie.)  Maybe the bus driver would think we moved away! At any rate, he never said anything.

Although we had just started first grade,  we have an October birthday-- we were, at that time, five years old.

Our totally awesome dog, April —who apparently had somewhat stronger maternal instincts than our mom—was none too pleased with the change of plans.  She jumped up and started following us down the hill. We tried to get her to go home, but she was not having it. She knew her job. She  came with us all the way to school, looked both ways crossing the road, and waited outside the school with us until the bell rang. Then she turned around and came straight home.

At the end of that day, Mantha and I—having plotted together at lunch (and where, despite occasional teasing, we also sat together, and continued to do so for the next 12 years) lined up with the walkers instead of getting in the bus line. No one noticed. We strolled, triumphant, back out to the road, and walked home in the golden autumn air. No more pinching! No gratuitous abuse heaped on poor Holly Hobbie! No more being constantly informed that we thought we were so great! I still dream about that walk—every house, every stone wall, every patch of poison ivy turning red in the fall, every tangle of Concord grapes.  It was heaven. 

A few weeks later, one of the neighbors said disapprovingly to my mom,

“Don’t you think your girls are a little young to be walking to school all alone?”

My mom said, startled, “My girls don’t walk to school! They take the bus!”

The neighbor shook her head and said, “No, they don’t, Sara—I see Samantha and Jesseca walking by my house every morning, and back in the afternoon. In the morning your dog goes too!”

My mom said, “I wondered where the dog was!”

She told Dad—by that time, we were six!—and they decided that since it had been going fine so far, we might as well keep on doing it. We finally told them how much we hated the bus, not to mention the 45 wasted minutes, when we could be wandering down the hill at our leisure with April. 

Mom and Dad said we had better be careful when it was dark, or snowing, or both. They also must have talked to us about not getting in strangers’ cars under any circumstances, because the day I fell off my bike in 4th grade and skinned my whole face, our neighbor ,Mr. Skilling tried to bring me home, but I refused, because a) I didn't recognize him in a suit  and tie, and b) had a lot of blood running into my eyes. (My mom patched me up and made me go to school anyway—“Just think of all the fun attention you’ll get today!”)

Today I know five year olds, and I am not making this up,  who are not even potty trained. Their parents feel an “adult-centered”  potty training schedule will cause them too much anxiety. This when, my sister and singlehandedly figure out to ditch mean girls and get ourselves to school with no help at the same age.