Last night our 6-year old son wet the bed. We didn’t realise until I found wet pyjamas by the side of his bed after breakfast. I casually asked him if he’d had an accident and he looked at his feet, embarrassed. I told him not to worry, it wasn’t a big deal at all, he just needed to let me know so I could clean the bed and the mattress. I gave him a kiss and I went back to his room to do just that.

Meanwhile my husband picked up the wet pyjamas, took them to my son, and asked him to sniff them, saying “It’s not ok to wet the bed at your age, this is disgusting”.

When I confronted him in the kitchen a minute later and asked him not to shame our son more than he already was, he told me that “He needs to learn not to wet the bed! When I was his age I never wet the bed!”

There are three things inherently wrong in my view with that statement, and I’ll start with the more obvious one:

Making a child embarrassed about something he or she cannot control is counterproductive. No person, and no child beyond toddlerhood, chooses to soil themself, any more than they choose to throw up if they’ve got a tummy bug. Children’s bladder control evolves as they grow older but doesn’t get perfect overnight and any combination of a full bladder, deep sleep, confusion and grogginess upon waking, or a dream about going to the toilet can all lead to an occasional accident. This isn’t the child being willful or lazy, it’s the child being a child – not yet an adult, without all the control of our bodies (and emotions) that growing up gives us. Making the child feel bad will only make them more self conscious, more embarrassed in the future, more likely to make fun of other children for doing the [wrong/embarrassing] thing, and more likely to try to hide it or lie about it.

The second and third points are about the “When I was that age” statement. 

The first is about the accuracy of these memories. Most children start losing their early childhood memories from about age 7, and will carry very few episodic memories with them into adulthood. Those will typically be of very good or very bad moments and will be imperfect, with the holes in the memory filled with retelling of the story by parents or other family members, or revisiting the place later in life. In fact I suspect that some of my childhood “memories” from when I was a toddler are fully reconstructed ones, not real ones, from hearing the same story so many times and trying to visualise it every time.

Even the memories from later in childhood (6 or 7 onwards) will be anecdotal and incomplete – centred mostly around the emotions that those situations created, but without a lot of detail of the date, circumstances, places, people or objects that surrounded them. For example I vividly remember my 1st grade classroom but only from that day that the teacher spanked me, bare bottom, in front of the whole class (it was the eighties, not that that excuses the teacher much). I have no memory whatsoever of what I did that day that was so bad. Maybe I had wet myself.

I also remember my 4th grade classroom because one morning I forgot to put underwear under my skirt and sat squirming on my seat all day, afraid to move or speak, lest a classmate realise. The only memory I have of my 2nd grade classroom is of the day I was first allowed to use a fountain pen (a reward for good handwriting) and I have no memories at all of my 3rd grade classrooms at all, probably because nothing too good or too traumatic happened in it. I also have other good memories, for example of my grandfather who died just before I turned 7, but again these are very episodic – two or three tidbits like the day he taught me to build a kite tail, or the honey-flavoured sweets he always gave me just before we left their house. I have no real conception of what he was like as a person except that he was nice to me. I’ve since learned he wasn’t a very good father, or a very good man. 

My husband has an excellent memory, so maybe he remembers his childhood better than I do. But even then, it’s unlikely he remembers all the 365 early mornings of his 7th year. He would probably remember wetting the bed if his parents had made a big deal of it, embarrassed him, told him off or punished him. The fact that he doesn’t remember doesn’t mean it never happened, it only means that if it did happen, it wasn’t traumatic enough to remember.

It’s also possible he didn’t have any accidents after he turned 6 and remembers that accurately. But then according to his ‘memories’, he could also read fluently, do multiplications and play chess by the time he was 4. And my own son says he can speak 7 languages although he can only speak 3, because he’s learnt “Hello” in another four of them and he genuinely believes he can ‘speak’ them. I have no idea how he’ll remember his language skills when he’s older, but I take all of these statements with a pinch of salt

The last point is about generational patterns. Even assuming the statement that follows “when I was your age” is actually true, that doesn’t make it relevant. For one, our children are different people that we are with different bodies, abilities, personalities, desires and emotions. Just because one of their parents could do something well at a certain age doesn’t necessarily make it a realistic or reasonable expectation of that child (who, let’s remember, has two parents in their genetic makeup). Secondly, just because we were raised a certain way doesn’t make it a good thing. A few generations ago, talking back to your father would be a fairly good way to guarantee bruised or bloody legs and back from a belting or other kind of corporal punishment. And then one day one of those fathers decided that just because that’s what happened when they spoke back to their parents, it wouldn’t be what happened when his child spoke back to him.

We are all full of these statements “When I was a child, this would not have been tolerated”, “I never took food from the dish with my fingers”, “I could control myself at that age and not do xyz”, “I always did my homework”, “I was never that lazy/distracted/loud/etc”. A lot of those, for the generation raised anytime up to the eighties and nineties, still carry an undertone of “or else, bad things would happen to me”.

My husband and I don’t agree on everything when it comes to raising our children, but we both agree, as do most parents, that we want to do [even] better than our own parents did. So therefore how we were brought up, how we behaved as children, and what our parents did or didn’t do when we didn’t, are just one data point. The most readily available to us, which makes it hard to completely ignore, but not necessarily always the one to emulate.