I’m tired of pretending my kids are something they aren’t. Every social media post, every family photo, every adorable little toddler outfit…they’re all trying to use cuteness to cover up the same basic truth:
My children are gross. Yours, too.
Babies? Gross. Toddlers? Gross. Kids? Gross. Teenagers? I don’t have a teenage kid, but based on my own experiences at that age, EEEEEWWWWWWWW.
It’s just a reality of being young: you have no idea what the social norms around cleanliness are yet. Kids don’t understand that leaving a half-drunk cup of milk in the back of a closet just isn’t done. All they know is that taking that cup to the sink costs valuable seconds that could’ve been spent fingerpainting, and that time spent washing their hands after fingerpainting costs valuable seconds that could’ve been spent touching all the clean laundry.
I’ve mentioned how hard it is to keep a house clean with kids before. I’m beginning to realize it isn’t a failing on my part, and it’s not really a failing on the kid’s part, either. It’s nobody’s fault. There’s just a span of time where kids have enough mobility to make a serious mess and no idea how to keep their living space hygienic or why it matters. From 10 months up until they get their first apartment, kids might as well just be some form of unusually tall racoon.
For example, while I was writing that last paragraph, my 2-year-old, Penny, who had been quietly playing on the floor behind me, started giggling. I didn’t think much of if until a pattern emerged: laughter, 6 second pause, laughter, 6 second pause, etc. So I turned around to see what the joke was.
She was taking big sips from her spill-proof cup (a detail that will be funny in 2 seconds), waiting a moment, and then opening her mouth to let huge mouthfuls of milk spill all over herself. The kid looked like she’d just gotten out of a pool. Drenched in milk from head to toe. Kids love to laugh at a milk mustache; Penny had milk leg hair.
How do you even address something like that? A 2-year-old can grasp the idea of “Don’t do that!”, but how would you even go about preventing that kind of event? What instruction could you give ahead of time? “Don’t marinate yourself in milk over a shag rug,” isn’t the kind of instruction I ever expected to come up.
(…I don’t even know what I’m gonna do about that rug. There’s no cleaning product in the world that’s gonna stop that thing from smelling like a bowl of feta cheese that’s been left out in the sun. Right now my plan is to just let the dogs lick it nonstop for the next hour and hope for the best.)
I’m beginning to wonder if the idea of dealing with a future mess is too abstract for a kid’s sense of cause and effect. Granted, Penny is still too young to understand that milk becomes disgusting when it soaks into shag carpeting, but it’s not just toddlers that do this kind of thing.
A year ago my older kid (7 at the time) had to have all of her snack-times restricted to the dining room table. I had assumed that, so long as she was bringing her dishes to the sink, it was ok for her to eat a snack on the couch while watching cartoons. That was before I learned that when she had a bite of food she didn’t want, she was stuffing it between the couch cushions. I had no idea until I went looking for a lost television remote and instead found two banana peels and a dozen rotting grape tomatoes. The rest of that evening wasn’t fun for anybody.
What stuck with me, though, is that she seemed shocked that they were still there. The kid understands object permanence, but seemingly had this idea that the area between the couch cushions was like ejecting her trash into another dimension. Surely, reality doesn’t persist there. It’s the kid’s version of dumping trash into the ocean: once it’s out to sea, it’s gone forever! …right up until you’re eating a tuna sandwich that contains as much plastic as a G.I. Joe.
I’m trying to take a long view of all this and see it as a potential learning opportunity. It’s never too early to learn that a small mess left to fester now becomes a disgusting ordeal to deal with later. The attitude that would rather cram a mess under a bed than pick it up is the same attitude that turns a credit card debt into a quagmire of late fees or lets a minor cavity grow into a root canal. Better to try and instill an understanding of long-term cause and effect when the stakes are just a gross mess to clean up and a lingering smell to live with.
…but in the meantime, I might need to start tracking milk in this house with the kind of tenacity that the UN uses to keep tabs on plutonium, because I am DONE will half full sippy cups of curdled yogurt under the furniture.
Inessential Reading 