To say that a child’s right to use a toilet or not be stopped from learning how to do it is a political matter is a bit radical. At first, it sounds like the kind of step too far that makes people laugh at the progressive Nordic education policy. But if you think about the case that Swedish OMEP has been making for a while, people tend to stop rolling their eyes.
The World Organization for Early Childhood Education (OMEP) has been a part of European childcare policy for a long time. There is a chapter in Sweden that is doing something a little more controversial. It is combining children’s rights frameworks, early childhood research, and the surprisingly controversial topic of toilet training into a position that other European groups are finding hard to ignore.
The main point of the argument comes from things like Peter Moss’s writings about how democracy works in places where young children learn. Moss, who had a huge impact on early childhood education in the Nordic countries, said that nurseries and preschools are not politically neutral places. They have beliefs, power structures, and ideas about what kids can and can’t do. Swedish OMEP has taken that idea and put it in the bathroom, which Moss may not have fully expected.
The claim is not that teaching kids how to use the bathroom is in and of itself a violation of human rights. It’s not quite that clear. When institutional childcare systems delay kids from becoming aware of their bodies and using the bathroom on their own, they are making a political choice. This could be because of policy, habit, or the business sense of diaper companies. One that limits children’s freedom. When you think about it more, this argument starts to look less like neutral child care and more like a decision about what kids can know about their bodies and when they can know it.
This way of putting things might still sound vague. But the research that backs it up isn’t. Researchers who study what they call “mundane politics” in early childhood settings have shown how kids, even very young ones, form political opinions, voice their preferences, challenge social norms, and deal with power. If a child refuses to use the nursery toilet or becomes very attached to a certain routine, they are not just being difficult. In a pretty clear way, they are acting as political subjects. These researchers say that the issue is that almost no one who works in institutional childcare is taught to see it that way.
The Swedish OMEP’s position stands out because it ties this academic framework to something very real and cross-cultural. In most of human history and most of the world today, kids didn’t wear diapers until they were three or four years old. This is pretty clear from both historical and anthropological records. Eastern European, East Asian, and many African parenting styles teach babies about the toilet early on, but not as a rigid training program. Instead, it is done gradually and in response to the child’s needs. The Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (W.E.I.R.D.) world came up with its own way of doing things, largely because disposable diapers were easy to get and people there liked setting goals based on readiness. That way of doing things is not necessarily wrong. However, it is not a biological rule that applies to all living things, and treating it as such has effects.
Slowly, the conversation in Europe is changing. A number of countries’ early childhood policymakers are starting to wonder if institutional norms about toileting, such as policies on using diapers, staff ratios during toilet time, and the age at which kids are supposed to start, are based on real evidence about how children develop or are just assumptions that have been passed down over time. The Swedish OMEP is no longer the only one asking these questions. The debate seems to have reached a level where it can’t be pushed to the side any longer.
What is still not clear is whether the way the children’s rights are framed will hold up when it comes to scrutiny from more conservative European member states, whose policies on institutional childcare are often based on very different traditions. It makes sense to say that bodily autonomy and political agency start in the nursery. The question of whether it leads to policy changes instead of conference papers is likely the more important one.
