Our Next Moral Battleground: Potty Training

There’s nothing like a little culture war to perk up your peacetime, to put a little zip into the humdrum of post-Cold War prosperity. Things get becalmed. Who you gonna call when there’s no enemy to define you, to pump you up by keeping you steamed?

Well, the impeachment people, but that looks like it might be over soon. Or the gay marriage types, though that’s fading now, too. So what will pass for a moral battleground? Desperate times call for desperate measures. John Rosemond, come on down.

Maybe you’ve heard of Rosemond already. A big draw in “family values” circles, he’s kind of a conservative’s Dr. Spock. His syndicated parenting column zings modern dogma on “timeouts” and “family meetings.” His public speaking engagements sell out in places like San Diego and Pittsburgh. His shtick is that psychobabble has made moms and dads wishy-washy and yuppie parents are micro-managing kids. His books have titles that Rush Limbaugh could have written, such as, “Because I Said So.” You get the drift.

He’s been around for 20 years, long enough to become a minor guru, but this month, a particularly provocative set of pronouncements boosted him from the middle markets into guru heaven--the front page of the New York Times. For just when you thought we’d run short on conflict, into the breach now comes Rosemond’s call for a crackdown on . . . poopie pants.

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Specifically, Rosemond, a North Carolina psychologist, has attacked both the views and the ethics of the noted pediatrician T. Berry Brazelton. Declaring himself “at odds” with Brazelton, Rosemond published a series of columns decreeing that kids should be potty-trained by the age of 2. If you’re a parent, you get the code here: Them’s fightin’ words.

Though past generations routinely toilet-trained children as early as 18 months, our generation put its faith in what Rosemond sees as a “laissez faire” approach.

Mainstream thought, as voiced by Brazelton, is: “Don’t rush your toddler into toilet training or let anyone else tell you it’s time. It’s got to be his choice.”

Rosemond has a problem with that sentiment because one place Brazelton voices it is in a Pampers ad. Brazelton, a professor emeritus of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School, held his views well before the ad gig, but Rosemond says it became a conflict of interest when Brazelton became a spokesman for a diaper company.

Rosemond’s own, presumably purer, thinking involves a method he calls “naked and $75.”

“You stay home from work with your child for two or three days,” he says, “and you let the child walk around naked, or in just a T-shirt.” Then you keep the potty chair near the child, and “when they have an accident, they start to yell, at which point you come along and say, ‘Well, you forgot to use the toilet.’ You put the child on the potty, praise him, and within five days, you’ve got a toilet-trained child.”

The $75 is for carpet cleaning afterward.

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Now before you say what I said upon reading about this method (“Hey, John, I got a better idea. How about you go spend a week chasing that naked baby with that pot!”) note that Rosemond insists his aim is well-intentioned: liberating kids from diapers, and women from the myth that nudging your child toward independence makes you a lousy mom.

Which would be refreshing, at least in spirit, except that as recently as 1992, Rosemond was echoing Dr. Pampers: “Depend on your child, not the calendar,” he wrote then.

So what’s this about, really? Because the dogma angle is pretty flimsy. Any parent knows that a kid’s keenest ambition is to grow out of childhood with all deliberate speed. A resourceful parenting guru or big media outlet, though, can find a culture war in a dirty diaper, build a career on the ol’ potty phase.

It’s hard to believe that parents now are any more obsessive than parents before them. But then, it’s also hard to believe that we could be hard-up enough to resort to “diaper wars,” as Time called them this week.

There’s a war on, all right, but from toddlers to gays to yuppie presidents, it’s just that old standby, fear vs. trust, loose vs. rigid. A fertile market, I hear, for gurus these days.

Shawn Hubler’s column appears Mondays and Thursdays. Her e-mail address is shawn.hubler@latimes.com.