I’m not the first to observe that parenthood is a self-taught class. It’s a position in which the people who could be considered the experts possibly haven’t changed a diaper in over a generation. My grandmother successfully raised five children while also working as a nurse part-time, and even still, I think she’d be stumped when my son throws a tantrum over Netflix taking too long to buffer on the iPad.

The best advice any young parent can receive is to get used to expecting the unexpected. Also, work on your improv skills, especially when it comes to toilet training.

At age 3, my little man Henry is still adjusting to the nuances of using the bathroom. He’s got a routine down, pieced together from what his mother and I have taught him. It just looks nothing like a routine that a normal person would use.

He’s too short to stand on the floor for his No. 1 business, but he refuses to use a kiddie potty. Instead, he removes all of his lower clothes, including his shoes. He straddles the seat, like Slim Pickens riding the bomb at the end of “Dr. Strangelove,” facing the toilet (since this would be the direction he would face if he was standing up).

He finishes the routine by getting off the toilet, ripping one square sheet of toilet paper off the roll, doing nothing with it, and tossing it into the bowl with the same motion someone would use while tossing salt over his shoulder for good luck.

This works well in the privacy of our home — as long as the routine concludes with a clean floor and a flushed toilet, I’m happy — but when he’s trying to take off his shoes in the mall’s restroom, his stubbornness begins to kick against mine. If he’s trying to teach me patience, it’s definitely a work in progress.

His 6-year-old sister Beatrice has also taught us a thing or two. She is the author of several self-published books drawn at the kitchen table, including “One Cold Wet Night.” This is a tale of a farmer trying to go to sleep, but faces several farm animals piled in his bed. As the story progresses, he shoos them all away except for one, a weta bug. With a moment of reflection, the farmer looks at the weta bug on his pillow and decides to sleep on the couch instead.

Do you even know what a weta bug looks like? I sure didn’t. When she read the book to us, we haughtily corrected her pronunciation, thinking she was trying to say “water bug.” She corrected us right back by saying, “No, weta bug. It lives in New Zealand.”

Sure enough, after we looked it up on Wikipedia, weta bugs not only live in New Zealand, but they can also grow to be about the size of your forearm. I’d sleep on the couch, too.

So while it might be a cliché to offer that parents have to educate themselves to stay one step ahead of their kids, in the end parents ultimately have to ask themselves, “what are they teaching us?”

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Tre Baker is the Deputy Online Editor for Arkansas Business Publishing Group, including Little Rock Family. He and his family live in North Little Rock, where there are no bugs that are larger than a shoe.