My 4-year-old is driving me insane. He’s into poopy talk... big time! I get asked at least five times a day, “Do you want to smell my butt?” with a gleeful emphasis on the word “butt”. It’s a rhetorical question, of course. I’ve tried answering, “Yes, I would love to smell your butt, honey; nothing would give me greater joy.” But that doesn’t seem to work. I’ve tried to reason with him and tell him it’s impolite (especially when I’m shoveling a forkful of mushy brown lentils into my mouth), to no avail. Time-outs are fruitless in excremental matters too.

I try to steer the dialogue in a more civilized direction, but I often fail. It usually goes something like this:
“Mommy, I tooted in my mouth,” my son says.

“You burped,” I correct him.

“Is ‘burped’ a bad thing to say?”

“No, burp is fine.”

“You have a poopy hat on your head.”

“ ‘Poopy hat’ is a bad thing to say.”

“You said ‘poopy.’”

You get the idea.

Nothing seems to quell the insatiable desire for a good poop joke. As a parent, it’s hard to know how to deal with potty talk. We have to walk that fine line between discipline and discovery.
At least his friends are on the same page. Call someone a “poopy-head” in front of a group of pre-schoolers and you’ll get a unanimous snicker. It’s a word that seems to cross regional, socio-economic, and, I suspect, generational backgrounds. I’d bet my low-water, energy-efficient toilet that “pee-pee pants” and “farty face” were big hits with our grandparents, too.

A wise friend, whose older son is mercifully out of this stage, tells me it’s a developmental phase. Pooping and peeing are on their minds a lot, she says, so that’s what they like to talk about. Kids are naturally curious. And the posterior part of the body is a mysterious region that weighs heavily on their minds. “Mommy, can boys poop standing up?” “Do girls’ poop and pee-pee come out of the same place?” “Does Superman poop?” These are sincere questions not to be dismissed.

It’s not surprising that they like to talk about it, because we do. From the moment they’re born, poop consumes a large part of a day’s discussion. The pediatrician wants a tally of wet diapers. Mom and Dad argue over who gets to change the next one and then swap stories with friends from the fecal trenches. And what parent hasn’t marveled out loud at the effect of last night’s blueberries?
Controlling potty talk in public can be challenging. There’s always someone ready to judge your parenting based on what comes out of your child’s mouth. Luckily, I have a slight advantage. My mom’s first language is Polish, so we grew up speaking bits and pieces of a foreign language. This comes in very handy in restaurants. The waitress hardly even blinks when my son orders a grilled doupa sandwich with a side of doupa fries.

Truth is, kids are smart. They learn to use innuendo early on. “If I can surprise them, I can make them laugh,” or so the thinking goes. The more shocking the topic, the funnier it is. Hopefully, by adolescence, they develop that part of the brain that filters out words before they reach the mouth. Then again, I taught middle school and I can tell you that the subject of bodily functions is still excellent material for 12-year-olds.

The worst part about this fecal obsession, of course, is that I think it’s hysterical, too. To this day I lose it when someone rips a loud fart in church, or tells me about the time they got so drunk in college they peed into the potted Ficus in their friend’s parents’ living room.

I once heard a mother at Tendercrop tell her daughter to stop laughing after Buffy the Buffalo walked up to the white fence and dropped a massive buffalo chip right in front of all the kids. Gently, this mother told her daughter she was hurting Buffy’s feelings. After all, no one laughed at her when she used the toilet. I was impressed. I grew up around farms. We loved the animals, but we never showed such consideration for their feelings.

My kids, on the other hand, were howling. “Look at the poop!” they shrilled. “He’s got poop on his butt!”

There’s no doubt that that other mom was on some higher moral footing. Maybe she’s more evolved than me. Her kids will probably grow up to do great things like open orphanages in Bolivia and cure athlete’s foot. But, come on, it was a huge, steaming buffalo turd! How can you not find that funny? Deep down, I think Buffy thought it was funny, too. Why else did she walk all the way from the shed to the fence to poop in front of a group of small people? Even buffaloes, it turns out, like a good poop joke.