To Make Families Feel Welcome, Join the Step Stool Revolution

About a year ago, I did something a bit daring. One of the churches that my family often attends has beautiful, clean restrooms, but the sinks in them—as with most public restrooms—are not designed with children in mind. Even my relatively tall five-year-old could not reach the faucet or the soap without my assistance. And by my assistance, I mean exactly the uncomfortable and awkward experience that all parents of young children know intimately: that of pinning my lifted child against the hard edge of the sink with my torso while using my hands to reach the soap and turn on the faucet. This experience is, to speak plainly, a real (though fleeting) misery.

The other alternative is to send the child to the restroom on her own. At age five or six, this might be appropriate, but would she wash her hands? Not if she couldn’t reach the faucet. And it was flu season, you know. 

So, I decided take matters into my own hands. I went to the store, bought a $10 plastic step stool, hid it furtively under my coat as I walked into church the next Sunday, and abandoned it by the bathroom sink. A year later, it’s still there, and I see kids using it all the time. 

I had never mentioned this to anyone, however, until my friend Amber Adrian posted something online about wishing bathrooms had such stools. I responded with the story, which I then reposted in various ways on Substack. To my great surprise, other parents who also attend this church somehow saw these posts and began gushing with excitement: “Bless you,” one mother wrote. “Every time I don’t have to lift my toddlers up to the sink, I feel immense gratitude.” Moms from other locales who had also seen step stools mysteriously materialize echoed these sentiments: “One just appeared in our parish bathroom…I don’t know who put it there but it’s so nice,” wrote one such mom. Other moms popped in quickly to say they would like to try solving the step stool problem, too. 

And so began what I will somewhat hyperbolically call the Step Stool Revolution of 2026! In various posts on social media (such as this one), some friends and I invited others to join us with a simple call to action: If you want to make your community more family friendly, buy a basic stool and leave it in a public restroom of your choice sometime during the month of January. No rules, no prizes, no nothing. Just buy and deliver a step stool.

When children are considered irritants in the ordinary spaces and activities of life, people begin to forget that many—perhaps even most—experiences are actually better with children present.

The response was heartwarming. Online friends, acquaintances, and strangers promised through restacks and comments to take up the charge, and a handful even reported purchasing triple-packs of stools! As mom Haley Baumeister wrote, “I’m a mother of four young children with only so many hands — so I am INVESTED in this challenge…a three pack of plastic stools is one of the better immediate investments of 35 bucks I can think of.” Another commenter echoed how important such little changes as a step stool can be, calling the idea “[t]he pronatalist advice we need.” 

Meanwhile, a father posted an image of a step stool and tricked-out changing table he had noticed in a bathroom in a Catholic abbey in Germany (prompting lots of warm ecumenical fuzzies, too, for he was Anglican). As my husband can attest, step stools and changing tables are even rarer in men’s bathrooms than in women’s (in the U.S., at least!), so I was thrilled to see men showing interest, as well. How many little boys can’t reach the sink in those bathrooms? Men’s bathrooms are often woefully unfriendly to families, and parents could do much to fix this: “We [previously] bought our parish a changing table for the men’s room!” wrote a commenter named Meg in response to a friend’s restack of the step stool idea. True, a changing table might be harder to sneak into a bathroom than a stool, so it would probably be best to ask permission when following Meg’s example—but let’s not let that stop us. 

It was clear from the responses that this very little act of placing a stool in a public bathroom can make a very big difference to families. It is a small intervention that somehow has big effects, and there’s something to be learned from this. Big interventions, however excellent, can sometimes seem overwhelming, but a little idea—the kind of small change that individuals can make—can go a long way in making people feel more welcome and supported. Setting up a meal train, providing a parking space for pregnant women, leaving a bag of outgrown kids’ clothes on a neighbor’s doorstep, or just quietly providing a bathroom stool is a small act but it makes people feel noticed. These may not be the biggest things, but they bring great value. A step stool or parking space or meal schedule says: Your children are welcome. We’ve thought of them, and we care about you.

And parents seem to understand it that way. Indeed, kids and their parents long for signs of welcome in a time when even McDonald’s has abandoned the idea of play grounds. Any parent who has traveled with young children, for example, knows what it is like to wish that more airports had spaces designed for children. (Fortunately, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy seems friendly to funding such playgrounds.) And to make it worse, families who might travel to attend weddings are also increasingly likely to find that their children are unwelcome at the ceremony. 

A step stool or parking space or meal schedule says: Your children are welcome.

When children are considered irritants in the ordinary spaces and activities of life, people begin to forget that many, perhaps even most experiences, are actually better with children present. Remember the “Dink Discourse” video in which the childless couple bragged about buying Costco snacks and pizza as a great part of not having kids? If we’ve forgotten that going out for cheap pizza is super fun with children, we’ve definitely lost the plot. Taking steps to make it obvious that children are valued in our public places is a great way to counteract this silliness and to encourage couples to have children in the first place.

So it seems that although we have not yet managed to reform our public school systems, fix the broken system of obstetrical care, or implement the myriad solutions needed to make our towns more pedestrian-friendly, there are many immediate, smaller things that average parents can do to make things feel much more family friendly (while we also keep working on the bigger problems). You can support free community events; you can give up your seat to a nursing mom at church; and you can keep a dollar in your wallet just in case you come across some kid’s lemonade stand this summer. Or of course, you could start by taking the small step of dropping off a step stool at your local church, coffee shop, or library restroom. You don’t have to go through channels or ask permission (unless you want to!)—the worst thing that can happen is that the stool is removed, and you have lost $10. 

Perhaps you can be the next family-friendly step stool revolutionary in your own community.

Dixie Dillon Lane is an American historian and essayist living in Virginia. She is an associate editor at Hearth & Field and is the author of Skipping School: A History of American Homeschooling and How It Went Mainstream.

*Photo credit: Shutterstock