I think it’s safe to say that having an accident in school is a definite low point in a child’s life. Especially if you wet your pants in front of the entire class, or worse, asking your teacher to use the bathroom, being told to “hold it” until the end of a lesson, doing so, then dashing down the hallway to the restroom, getting into a stall, and then loosing it right before you can get your pants down.
Now imagine that scenario happening on your birthday, and you know what kind of emotional scar my 6-year-old is dealing with.
For the record, I adore my child’s teacher, but I cannot for the life of me understand why she (or any teacher for that matter) would deny a child the personal right to urinate when her body signals the need to do so.
What kind of teacher interferes with a child’s bodily functions?
Sure, there are children who abuse bathroom breaks, I am highly cognizant of this fact, but my kid is not one of them, and her teacher knows this.
What’s more, a child’s age plays a huge role in bathroom breaks. Anyone with a young child knows that little ones often hold their urine because they don’t want to miss out on any fun while they are going potty. First graders don’t have the same motives or tendencies to fib about peeing, then a bored fifth or sixth grader who is looking for an excuse to roam the school’s hallways.
In my child’s case, the teacher insists that she allowed all the children to go potty prior to beginning a lesson on money. She then told them that they were not allowed to go again until the end of the lesson. Twenty minutes into the lesson my kid had to relieve herself. She asked permission, was denied, then wanted to ask again, but was too shy to do so because she “didn’t want to get into trouble.”
I know for a fact that after a certain point my daughter was way more focused on holding her urine than listening to her teacher go on and on about how five dimes equals fifty cents the same way two quarters do.
I realize that the teacher didn’t want any of her students to miss out on instruction time, but would my kid have flunked math if she had missed the dime conversion in the three minutes it would have taken to relieve herself?
Whatever happened to educators being sensitive to students’ needs?
Does your child complain about having to hold his urine at school?
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