Agreed. It’s not as if the OP took his daughter into the lockerroom at a gym or water park. A few years ago I saw a guy take his daughter (5/6?) into the men’s changing room at a water park. Naturally there were naked men and boys in there and he had the nerve to storm out screaming about “perverts exposing themselves” to his little girl. :mad:
Maybe, maybe not. In some schools now, due to fears of school shootings, students are taken to the bathroom in groups at specified times. No one is allowed in the hallways during classes, not even teachers. (That way, anyone in the hall is “obviously” an intruder, and an alarm is sounded.)
'Sides, I don’t think it’s necessarily analogous anyway. I’ve gotten lost trying to find my table in a restaurant after visiting the restroom, I wouldn’t expect greater skill from a kid barely taller than the tables. After a few weeks at school, though, and walking through an empty hallway, I’d expect the kid to be able to find his way to and from without any trouble.
Plus, one assumes (perhaps wrongly) that Stranger Danger isn’t lurking in the restrooms of a school, but might be in the movie theater.
For me, there are three considerations: how much help does the kid need with the mechanics of bathroom use? Can s/he do zippers and snaps and tights and wipe herself hygienically? Can they do the latch on the door and reach the faucet and paper towels? Most kids can’t do all this until 5 or 6. Secondly, can the kid locate and identify the proper gendered bathroom and find his way back to the parent when done? I’m sure this has the largest variance among both kids and restrooms. Finally, is the kid old enough to handle any creep who might try something inappropriate with an unattended kid in a private space? Again, this depends totally on the kid. Some kids are adult pleasers and don’t want to make waves - they need supervision a lot longer than the kid who will yell, kick and run away screaming if someone approaches him.
Whether or not it’s likely at all for Stranger Danger to be in the restroom is not really the point. The point is how safe your kid will be IF Stranger Danger is there. I hate assuming that everyone’s a creep, and I teach my kids that most people aren’t. But they still have to be of an age and maturity where I can trust them to handle it if they do run into one of the rare ones.
As I remember elementary school, there was a single bathroom attached to each classroom that was used by only one person at a time, and it had a locking door. That’s a little different than going into a public bathroom with adult strangers.
I’ve been to dozens of elementary schools and never seen one like that–so I think your case is rare. But the point about strangers is true, and I think that is the real question. At what age is your child mature enough to deal with strangers in the bathroom? I think 3rd grade is more than sufficient for most kids. Most 3rd graders I know would be a little weirded out if their parents insisted on standing outside the bathroom door whenever they went in a public place like a movie theater.
My Dad did something like that with me when I was small (4 or 5). It was the men’s bathroom/shower/change area and Mom wasn’t along on this trip so I remember sitting in the change area while Dad had a shower. I don’t recall if anyone else was in there while we were though. (We were camping on the way from Edmonton to Vancouver).
snorts What did he expect? I’m sure most were surprised to see a girl in there! Thing is, though I’ve seen family rooms at small leisure centres, I don’t recall seeing them at the last ‘bigger’ leisure centres/water parks I went to.
IMO, seven or eight is too old for a little girl to go into a men’s room. MUCH too old. Little girls are perfectly capable of going into a ladies room with a dad hovering outside waiting at five years. I’ve never seen a man with a little girl not have someone offer to take the girl in. And in the event he says she’s going to be fine alone, every woman in there keeps an eye in her anyway.
Three years old? You did the right thing Wee Bairn, she’s too young to be unaccompanied.
There’s an overreaction.
I meant to go into the restroom while the adult waits outside the door.
My daughter is 3, and I would never EVER let her go anywhere in public where I couldn’t see her. You definitely did the right thing. Not sure how old she will be when I let her go by herself…I think I’ll play that one by ear.
My middle son is almost 3, and in a pinch, I would take him into the Ladies’ Room, and probably get no dirty looks for it. He’s just totally inadequate about wiping himself, and sometimes has a little trouble getting his pants up and down. If I were solo with all three boys, then yes, my 6-year-old and 18-month-old are coming in too. What, I’m supposed to leave them in the hallway? If the 6-year-old has to pee, I suspect that other women are more accepting of him and the babies in the Ladies’ Room than men would be of an adult woman in the Men’s Room.
My husband said he never caught any flak for taking his preschool-aged daughters into Men’s Rooms, back when he was a single father.
My son is just nine and that matches my experience perfectly. Now he goes to the restroom by himself if we are at a restaurant or a movie. Granted, I won’t let him go to the restroom alone at a truck stop - there I’m still standing outside the door saying “are you OK?”
His sister, being only a year younger than him, followed a similar pattern with perhaps a little more precociousness, except, of course, we do the girl thing and both go to the bathroom together. But if she is with her Dad, he stopped taking her in when she was about five. There is something less threatening to parents about ladies rooms than men’s rooms.
I would have asked her if boys were allowed in the Men’s Room. After all, it says “Men”.
Whoa-do you have a link? Into the stall? How would they both fit, anyways?
Are you sure said kid wasn’t mentally retarded, perhaps?
I swear I don’t remember this and I’ve been around awhile - can you maybe find the thread? This I HAVE to read… 
As to the OP, my experience with my son is about the same as WhyNot and Dangerosa. So, um, I guess my answer is “me too”.
Is it possible the mentality of the woman in the OP is a reflection on culture? She was black, and I asked five other people I know about this, the three whites agreed with me, the two who were black, both otherwise sensible, but both agreed with the woman?
The woman was a loon…
A kid of the wrong gender for a given washroom is relegated to the privacy of a stall regardless. I suspect that the alternative of you taking her into the womens washroom may have been frowned upon as well.
We have 6-1/2 year old boy/girl twins. The kids are still not tall enough to be guaranteed to reach the faucets/soap/paper towel when they are done, and frequently need assistance.
Typically my wife will take my daughter and I will take my son to the washroom, but have no hesitation about mixing things up. Besides, at this age going to the bathroom is strictly a mechanical exercise rather than a tittilating event.
My sister-in-law allows her 7 year old son to go to the washroom by himself, as long as she is waiting outside. I went in after him, and could justify my reluctance to allow them to use the washrooms unattended by seeing him using the urinal. I am quite comfortable with the boys using urinals…if they can reach it. The problem is that he wants to be a big kid and use the urinal when most of the time it is still 3 inches too high. Standing on tiptoes and maintaining full contact with the soiled rim of the urinal is not acceptable in my opinion. I quickly persuaded him to use a toilet.
I would think a typical 6-year-old could wait in the hall.
I’ve wondered about this since toilet training my 3yr old. My husband is a SAHD and as such takes the girls (youngest is 22mo) on solo trips now and then. Three year olds don’t give you much warning when they decide they have to go. I wouldn’t have a problem with him taking them in a men’s room. I’m failing to see how they would be traumatized by seeing a man using a urinal on their way to the stall. I think the men in question would be more disconcerted than the 3yr old.
I can certainly see my husband being uncomfortable going into the ladies’ room, and the more I think about it the odder that is. Everything private in a ladies’ bathroom goes on inside the stall. So what if a man witnesses a woman refreshing her lipstick?
Either way, the 3yr old must be attended. She can’t even get up on the toilet seat without either using a step stool (the at home solution, obviously not present in your average public restroom), being lifted by an adult, or by scrambling up the fixture like a monkey (I’ve watched this process at home when she didn’t want to use the step stool. The thought of her doing so on a public toilet grosses me out and I’m no germophobe.).
The OP was absolutely correct and should just ignore the raving busy-body, just like you would ignore someone raving about the end of the world coming.
I find myself at a lot of different public pools and most of the locker rooms have signs on the doors that say “Children ages X and above must use gender appropriate locker rooms”, where the value of X is always from 5 - 7. It’s a bit odd when I come out of a shower and see a 7 year old girl looking at me, but not a whole lot odder than someone else gauking.
One strange story - Once, a man and his son (5 or 6) were changing out of their swimsuits and I could hear the mom at the door of the locker room yelling instructions. I guess the dad couldn’t be trusted not to screw up putting on pants. I took my shower, all the time listening to the yelled instructions becoming more urgent. So when I stepped out of the shower, I shouldn’t have been so surprise to see a woman standing in front of me, yelling at the dad but staring at me. No surpised look on her part, no apolgy and no let up on in the instructions, she just went back holding the door open and holding forth.
Ha! That’s what I said, and I caught some flack for it. I’ll search for the thread. I think the user ended up banned…does that mean that they delete her threads?
Well, I’ve just exhausted my search capabilities and didn’t find it. If memory serves, the doper was vanilla, her son was 11 or 12 and small for his age and had spent much of the school year at home sick, so perhaps wasn’t as socialized as his peers, and therefore didn’t rebel against having to go into the stall with his mom.
If someone else is able to find it, I’d like to read it. Maybe my memory is all wrong and wasn’t like that at all.