Toilet Training & Ego Depletion

I noticed, over the weekend, the my youngest daughter was much more melt-down prone.  Like, ridiculously more, I'd say by a factor or two or three times.  And not over big things, like having to miss a birthday party or having to leave the park ("big" accounting for what's considered big from a kid's perspective), but over tiny, insignificant things.

I remembered similar behaviour from my older daughter, and the catalyst in both cases seemed to be that they were learning how to use the bathroom.

I first learned of the concept of ego depletion in Daniel Kahneman's oft-referenced book "Thinking Fast & Slow."  It's a very simple, very powerful metaphor - you have a finite amount of willpower to spend on paying close attention to, and changing your habits, and the more you spend, the more you tend to revert back to your baseline, thoughtless behaviours.  It's easy to see how this idea plays into all sorts of things like diet & exercise, quitting smoking, akrasia, &etc.

Children are in a constant state of ego depletion - their baseline behaviours are just awful.  If they want something, their default method of getting it is to yell an impolite demand (at least, this seems to characterize my kids - YMMV).  You can train them to suppress this behaviour, but it takes constant correction and a lot of effort on their part.

It's pretty easy to see toilet training as a huge drain on the ego resevoir - constantly self-monitoring your bowels and changing the habit of just peeing wherever you stand and continuing on with your day must just take a huge amount of effort.  This will tend to make children melt-down prone.

In terms of parenting-style, I'm not entirely certain how to best incorporate this model.  On the one hand, I have an intuition that I should add a little more "compassionate dad" and dial-down on "dad the hard-ass," to help deal with the fact that hard work is being done to meet a new challenge.  On the other hand, ego depletion is a thing we will all have to deal with as adults, it's a fully-generalizable skill, and it's something that may have serious long-term benefits for a little short-term pain now.

The good news is, she stayed dry the entire weekend.  Go Lilah!