Oh Crap! Potty Training

out where the fence is, so to speak. The reason you physically fence in
your yard is so your child can’t wander and get lost. Limits and
boundaries are the fence in your child’s psyche. With them intact,
just as in your yard, your child feels safe and secure knowing where he
can and can’t go.
A trend in modern parenting is to assume that the child is capable
of deciding good things for himself without being provided any
boundaries or limits. This is just not the case. I often look to the
Montessori system for examples of how to allow children to make
decisions while also providing boundaries. Within a certain
framework, the children are free to make choices, but they are not
free to do whatever it is they want. Johnny might prefer Tinker Toys
to Lincoln Logs; that’s his freedom within that play center. But
Johnny isn’t allowed to wander aimlessly through all the toys. The
children all eat lunch together. You can’t have a bunch of kids with
access to the snack fridge and leave it up to them to decide when
they are hungry—you would have mayhem. The children all go
outside together, whether one is tired or not. Our children require
some fences. Within those fences we can allow for tremendous
freedom.
Bringing Up Bébé by Pamela Druckerman was released to a torrent
of mixed press. Ms. Druckerman claims that the French, in general,
are doing a better job of parenting than Americans are, largely
because of the French notion of cadre. Cadre, loosely translated,
means “framework.” French children are given a strict framework, but
within that they have tremendous freedom. There is much I don’t
like in the book—or rather there’s much about what the French