December 17, 2008

家裡有小男生的請注意 - Toilet-Seat Trauma

家裡有小男生正在 potty train 的請看這篇文章. 原文在此.

Toilet-Seat Trauma

By Lisa Belkin

I live in a house full of males. Even the dog is a boy, and he is the only one of the clan that I haven’t had to ask to please put down the toilet seat when he’s finished.

It is an argument so common as to be cliché, but in this month’s issue of BJU International, which is the British Journal of Urology, doctors gave it a new wrinkle.

A pediatrician at Leighton Hospital in England, Joe Philip, writes in the letters section about four cases of little boys who were injured when a heavy toilet seat fell and crushed the tip of their tender parts. All the children were between the ages of two and four, all were recently toilet trained, and all the injuries were serious enough to require an overnight hospital stay.

In each of these cases the seat in question was not a usual plastic seat but a heavy wooden decorative seat, leading to the first suggestion the author gives to parents who now have one more thing to worry about: do not use those kinds if you have a male toddler in the house.
Philip also suggests that parents install “soft fall” toilet seats which “tend to fall slowly with reduced momentum onto the toilet, markedly reducing risk and degree of injury.” Toddlers should be taught to hold the seat up with one hand as part of the potty training process, he writes, and should be supervised until they are physically able to do so.

The he makes one last suggestion sure to reignite a running debate between the sexes.
“Studies have shown that the social norm of leaving the toilet seat down is inefficient and not always welfare-enhancing,” Dr. Philip concludes. “Therefore households with a male infant should agree the default position for the toilet seat should be ‘up.’”

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