Off-Schedule Children

“Ruchie is three and a half and still afraid to use the toilet. I feel like the teacher thinks I’m a horrible parent. But Ruchie just has this fear. We’re working with our pediatrician and I’ve tried everything to help her get over it! What else can I do?”

Ruchie is not on schedule. According to the timetable she’s supposed to be able to use the toilet at school but she can’t. Ruchie’s mom is feeling the pressure; if your child isn’t on schedule there must be something wrong with you as a parent. And yet as most parents notice somewhere along the line children are not controllable. They develop according to their own inner G-d-given agenda. Each child is on his or her own journey physically mentally emotionally and spiritually. Parents are facilitators helping their youngsters move along their courses in the best possible way. They cannot make their kids capable of carrying out developmental tasks that they aren’t ready for. In the same way that a child takes its own time to be born it takes its own time to develop — much as we parents might object to our lack of choice in the matter.

Who Makes the Schedule?

Certain schedules are made by Hashem. It is Hashem for example Who arranges the time that babies will hold their heads up independently sit up crawl walk and talk. However the schedule of development in humans is somewhat flexible. A child may begin speaking at one year old or a year later at two. He may walk at nine months or at nineteen months. He may be dry at night by two years of age or by five. There is room for individuality. Nonetheless it is interesting that parents often take personal credit for the early development of their children. “Yossi already smiles/talks/has a tooth! Isn’t he clever?” (And aren’t we brilliant for having such a precocious baby?) And parents whose children lag behind often feel like failures. Although they won’t necessarily say it out loud they may feel it inside: “Chaim is already thirteen months and he doesn’t walk/have a single tooth — shame on us! We’re late.”

Certain schedules are man-made. WE decide that a child belongs in school all day when he or she is two or three years old. (In the past we decided that kids didn’t have to be in school all day until they were five years of age.) Whatever decision we make this becomes a new schedule in our minds. Therefore if our particular child balks at attending school when she is two years old we may be afraid that she is not on schedule. We compare ourselves to other parents and wonder where we went wrong. We feel judged by onlookers.