Alert! Blogger Needs ASSistance!
Posted on August 25th, 2007 by Jennifer
Dateline: Somewhere in Californ-I-A
Smiling Mom, brilliant mother, teacher, and cook has a dilemma. She needs to know when children start wiping their butts.
People, I need to learn this information, too! Not now, of course, but sometime in the future. I’m on butt-wiping duty for several more years, I fear.
Please go offer your ASSistance to Smiling Mom.
This is your chance to really make a difference in someone’s life. (Wipes tears from my eyes.)
My son’s sticky butt really thanks you!
Man I have the same question. My son is 4 1/2 and he thinks I am crazy when I suggest he wipe his own butt.
So cute.
I don’t know the answer….I’m still wiping Fa’s butt…
Now that is a very good question!
I think it’s about six with boys, to be honest. I haven’t reached that glorious stage yet with my own kids, obviously, but I babysat my nephews quite extensively during their potty-training, and the oldest is now six and is just now capable of going to the bathroom completely on his own. Even when he was four and five and technically potty trained, I remember doing lots of loads of really horrid skid marked underpants and realizing that this kid could not be trusted to attend to his own behind yet.
In my (somewhat less involved) experience with girls, it’s around four or five. They just care a little more about being clean, I think, and also it’s more ingrained in their heads to wipe, since as girls we do it every time we use the bathroom, and boys usually only do for number two.
Before I hop on over to smiling mom….I’m not sure there’s a clear graduation day. I think over the years we’ve evolved through varying degrees of “wipe completion”. The nine-year old boy has it down pretty well. His is a situation where we have to trade a clean bottom for an entire roll of paper in the toilet. (a compromise I’m more than happy to make!) The five-year old girl who has no patience wipes what I refer to as her “bum aura”…we have to make sure she goes back for actual skin contact.
Oh shit, let me run RIGHT over there and spread about my skid mark authoritay!
I’ve been wondering that myself lately as the wee girl sometimes has to fend for herself while I’m breastfeeding the baby. The consequences are never pretty.
I’d like to know that answer too, because I’m sitting here sweating and calculating how many butt wipes I’ll have with triplets until they reach six.
I should remember from my older kids, but that was before Alzheimers set in, and I just can’t remember! ha~
Wonder if we should tell her that not only do you have to wipe the butt, you have to wash the butt so they don’t have “itchy butt syndrome”.
Tanya
I’ve been wondering that lately too. I’m guessing Sweet Boy will be about 8 or 9 before he’s completely independent in these matters. Now, if I can just get him to stop pooping in his Good Nights before this baby is born … 7 1/2 months should be enough time to accomplish that, right? Right?!
Kids?
They wipe butts?
Do tell.
My 4-year-old has to be reminded to wipe after she PEES.
Oh gosh, I can’t remember this one at all. Hey, are you originally from Alabama, or the south? I’m new to your blog and haven’t gotten as far as an ‘about me’ page yet.
and….OH MY LAWD, what were you doing up and posting at 5:07 AM on a Saturday?
I seemed to have blocked that one out of my memory banks…I just remember thinking it would never ever happen. But it did!
Oh christ….this is what they don’t tell you when you don’t have kids.
FIve is about the time my cousin started wiping his. My niece was four. Who knows? I guess it happens when you make them do it. Or something.
What age do they wipe their own butts? 2! Do you want it to be clean after said wiping? then 4.5 to 5. At least that is how long it took my boys.
I am soooo glad the only ass I have to wipe anymore is MINE!
I just did a post on this stanky topic!
http://sarahviz.blogspot.com/2007/08/queen-of-toilet-paper.html
I think I have a worse problem. My JUST three-year-old son WANTS to wipe his own butt.
It doesn’t go well.