Why My Husband Is Uncomfortable Taking Our Daughter Into Women’s Restrooms (And What We Do About It)
It was 85 degrees at the city zoo last Saturday, and my 4-year-old, Lila, had just begged for a pink snow cone that dripped down her wrist before Mark, my husband, even handed me the bag of fries we’d ordered. She tugged hard on the hem of his khaki shorts and said she needed to pee right now.
Mark froze, his hand still hovering over the soda machine. He glanced at me, the popcorn I was holding slipping a little out of the bag, and I knew exactly what that look meant. “I can’t go in there,” he said, nodding toward the women’s restroom around the corner. The men’s room was all the way at the other end of the zoo plaza, and we both knew Lila wouldn’t make it that far.
This isn’t a new conversation for us. It started about three months ago, after a trip to the grocery store. Mark had taken Lila into the women’s room with him when I’d stayed in the car with our newborn son, and an older woman waiting in line made a quiet comment to her friend about how Lila was too old for that. It wasn’t a loud confrontation, just a side-eye and a mumbled “that’s inappropriate if you ask me,” and it stuck with Mark.
Since then, he’s said it over and over: he’s a 6’2” grown man. Walking into a women’s restroom where people are changing, using open stalls, or just trying to have privacy feels wrong to him. It’s not just the awkwardness of other people staring. He’s the one who’s been pushing us to teach Lila about body boundaries from the time she was potty training—about who can see her naked, about private spaces. It doesn’t sit right with him to break those same boundaries for other people, just because we have a kid who needs to pee.
I used to brush it off at first. “She’s four,” I’d say. “No one cares.” But the more I thought about it, the more it made sense to me. If a woman doesn’t want a strange man in the restroom she’s using, that’s her right. And if Mark is uncomfortable, that’s his right too. We didn’t need to force it just because that’s what everyone else does.
At first, we tried just relying on family restrooms. That’s the go-to answer everyone gives, right? But the thing is, half the time we go somewhere new, the family restroom is locked for cleaning, or it’s out of order, or there’s a 15-minute line at the mall. One time we waited 10 minutes for a family restroom at an amusement park and Lila ended up having an accident anyway. So that wasn’t a reliable solution.
We started small, practicing at home. First, we had Lila use our bathroom with the door closed, while Mark and I stayed in the hallway. We taught her how to lock and unlock a stall door, how to yell through the door if she needs help pulling up her underwear or pants. We got a foldable travel potty seat that fits in my purse and fits on any public stall, so she doesn’t have to sit on a dirty public seat, which was a big hang-up for her anyway. We keep a pack of disposable seat covers and extra hand sanitizer in there too, just for good measure.
Now, when Mark is out alone with Lila and there’s no family restroom available, he does three things. First, he walks her to the women’s room entrance, stands right by the door where he can hear her the whole time, and talks to her through the door while she goes. If she can handle it alone, that’s it. If she needs help, he asks the first woman who walks in to use the restroom if she’d mind checking on Lila to help her pull up her clothes. Nine times out of 10, the woman says yes without hesitating, especially if they’re a parent themselves. The one time someone said no, he just asked the next person, and that was that.
If there’s no one around to ask, or he doesn’t feel comfortable asking, he takes her into the men’s room. He stands right outside her stall, keeps talking to her the whole time, and helps her as soon as she’s done. We keep a pack of extra underwear and a thin pull-up in the diaper bag just for emergencies, in case she gets nervous and has an accident before we work it out.
It’s not a perfect system. It adds five minutes to every bathroom trip, and sometimes people stare when Mark is standing right outside the women’s room door talking to a 4-year-old. There are still people who tell us he’s overreacting, that it’s totally fine for a dad to take his little kid into the women’s room. That’s true for a lot of people, and that works for their family. It just doesn’t work for ours.
We still haven’t figured out every scenario. Last week at the small children’s museum downtown, there was no family restroom, and the only woman nearby was in a hurry and said she couldn’t help, so Mark ended up standing in the entryway of the women’s room while Lila used the stall, which made both of them uncomfortable. But it worked, and we moved on.
Right now, this is what gets us through. We’re not trying to change anyone else’s mind, or tell anyone how to handle their own family. We just know that honoring Mark’s discomfort, and respecting the privacy of other people, matters more to us than getting out of the store or the zoo two minutes faster. In a couple of years, Lila will be old enough to go to the bathroom alone no matter where we are, and this whole problem will go away. Until then, this works well enough.
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