A mum who says she’s ‘too busy to potty train’ has defended sending her daughter to school in night nappies, having responded to recent comments from an MP that served as a ‘guilt trip’ to many parents.
Any parents will know that potty training can be a long process. Sure, some children miraculously seem to grasp it almost instantly, but for many others it’s a long road of soaking wet beds and lots of tears and tantrums.
Mum Shona Sibary said her blood was ‘boiling’ after MP Miriam Cates suggested the process could take just ‘weeks’ with the right amount of dedication.
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Talking at the Alliance For Responsible Citizenship conference, the politician had said: “Consider the rising number of young children who start schooling in the UK still wearing nappies... potty training can take weeks of dedication to the task.
“This is increasingly impossible when our GDP-obsessed economic system demands that even mothers of small children leave their infants in daycare to return to the workplace.”
Writing for the Daily Mail, Sibary asked how many others felt ‘racked with remorse for being forced to put work before childcare’, having been all too familiar with the problem herself.
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“Of all the weeks to lay this particular guilt trip at our door - just after a relentlessly rainy half-term, with the spectre of Christmas looming,” she wrote.
“And to pour even more fuel on the fire she seemed to focus her ire on working mothers, as if dads play no part in the parenting equation.”
Speaking about Cates’ comments, Sibary continued: “My blood boiled. But I must admit to agreeing with part of her remarks. Toilet training is difficult. And incredibly tedious.
“By the time I'd had my fourth child, Dolly, I was so over this particular parenting challenge that I (look away now, Miriam) almost raced back to work to avoid it.”
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She added that ‘happily’, much of the task then fell to her ‘useless au pair’, who allowed Dolly to ‘run around the garden all day wearing nothing from the waist down, letting her pee all over the rhododendrons’.
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Sibary also said her youngest daughter is a ‘late August baby’ who started school just one week after turning four.
"I'm ashamed to say she was still wearing night nappies at the time,” she wrote.
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“Was this my fault for focusing on work and not spending my days encouraging her to sit on a potty? Guilty as charged, I'm afraid. But that was my choice.”
The mum-of-four said that, looking back, it now feels ‘obvious’ that she needed childcare to work effectively, and that she could also ‘outsource some of the more boring bits of parenting’.
“But neither au pairs nor nurseries did the job as well as I could have done if I'd had nothing better to do with my day,” she added.
“Which, obviously, I did.”
Jess Hardiman