OK, parents of toddlers everywhere - I have a question.
Are your children pure engines of destruction? Are they bright, inquisitive, and mechanically adept enough to field strip a TV remote in less than ten seconds? Can they climb absolutely anything, unscrew virtually any top, and dump any liquid imaginable anywhere you’d least like that liquid to be? Are they insanely willful? Do they shrug off corporal punishment, corner standing, reprimands, being ignored, and positive reinforcement alike?
Do they throw fit after fit? Do they cling to and climb on just one parent (usually mom) 24/7?
Do they somehow always wind up in your bed at night, because they will otherwise scream for hours keeping everyone up?
I love my kids. They are smart, funny, and insanely cute. They simply seem impervious to our best efforts to cure them of their worst behaviors. I am not afraid of punishing them, but I don’t want to make them terrified of me just to get them to fall in line.
Those of you with difficult toddlers, what works (or worked, if you survived) for you? What didn’t?
Our eldest wasn’t like this. This is uncharted territory.
Our eldest proved to be less of a roadmap for the others than I would have liked, most definitely regarding her little sister.
It’s an attention thing, as I have come to understand. Your first gets undivided attention, and each subsequent child gets less of the pie, so to speak.
What we have done is schedule time for each of them–either going out with Mom or Dad on errands, or for a snack at a restaurant and the like. That has helped.
Yeah, I hear you–I don’t want to be known as Barking Dad, either.
Yes, yes and yes.
some toddlers are perfect angels, who play quietly all day, do as they are told, and skip happily off to bed at night. None of the mutants have been my children, however.
Our current three-year-old, Helen, specializes in making shambles. She will, literally, go from room to room, dumping stuff out of say the bookshelf to the floor. While you are cleaning that up, she’s knocking over the flour canister in the kitchen. While you’re cleaning that up, she’s pouring iced tea into the computer keyboard. All in the space of a half-hour.
A toddler is a person who has just discovered that he is a separate person from Mom. It’s at once terrifying and liberating. The key to making it through is to keep her distracted, and to realize that it’s TEMPORARY.
Oh, the kids in bed thing? We’ve had kids in our bed more or less full time since 1981. It’s no big deal.
-Are your children pure engines of destruction?-
No. 3 will chew through any thing left at his altitude. His altitude extends above his height, because if he can’t chew it, he climbs on top of it.
-Are they bright, inquisitive, and mechanically adept enough to field strip a TV remote in less than ten seconds-
We have four controls, all destroyed. (by No. 3)
-Do they shrug off corporal punishment,-
No. 1, a girl, when we lived in Honduras and NOTHING electrical was grounded, used to like to play with the switch on the fan. I was so scared by this, I would smack her hand as hard as I could to keep her from getting electrocuted. She would then offer me her other hand to smack, with out a flinch. I was pretty demoralized by that.
-but I don’t want to make them terrified of me just to get them to fall in line.-
Yeah, that’s depressing. But get over it. Sometimes even a good Dad is an ape. The Mr. Rogers routine just doesn’t work all the time.
-Our eldest wasn’t like this. This is uncharted territory.-
I used to think that a child’s behavior was all a result of parenting. Our first was simply angelic. No. 2 never stopped screaming. No.3 …(OMG, I just took a box of matches from him. I left them on top of a 6-foot fridge. He’s only two years old. No idea how he got them.) No. 4, only four months old, is so far our most amenable, happy baby.
It’s a crap shoot. As a teacher I have seen simply awful parents with perfect children, and vice versa. Good parenting is important, but there’s plenty of nature, as well as nurture, involved.
After my brother-in-law read the Jungle Book to my nieces, he started calling the children Bandar-log after the monkeys in that story who are described as leaderless, lawless, and without a language of their own. It’s amazing how well that applies at times.
That’s good, Lorraine. We just call them “our feral children.”
Ha. I like that. Rafe is known as Dr. Octopus because his little hands have a range of destruction far exceeding the logical capacity of their number and size. We also used to say “Release the Kraken” whenever we freed the wild, stickiness of Alex from his booster chair after a meal. (If you recognized that reference to Clash of the Titans, then you are another poor soul who still bears scars from the Freak Show of 80’s entertainment.)
What’s wrong with Clash of the Titans? That was a great film! Next you’re going to say that the original Battlestar Galactica was hokey.
Steve,
I’ve seen this often enough (and our family bears this out) that it seems to be a pattern. The initial temperament of Child #1 will be sweet and mellow — enough to make you think “hey, this parenting stuff isn’t so bad, maybe we could handle more…”
Then, #2 arrives, and you wonder “hey, didn’t I order another mellow kid? Where’d this one come from?”
peace,
(Catholic) thoughtcrime of the day:
So glad I don’t have kids.
So.
Glad.
They are very challenging. You can’t control their behavior but you can control your reaction to it. You should not be frustrated they should be frustrated by the consequences they are experiencing.
Just be consistent and after a few years they start to catch on. My thoughtcrime of the day is that Dr. Dobson was very helpful to me when my oldest terrorized me. She could literally scream for hours on a car ride. B/c she wanted to get out of her car seat. She would put her fingers in the electric outlet over and over again in spite of spankings. When I would plead with her, do you want a spanking she would grin and say YES!
We bested her. I don’t know how and I don’t know how she survived her daring feats, climbing, jumping, spraying bleach into her sister’s eyes (she was fine) that she reached over the cabinet above the stove when she was 2 1/2., painting the hallway rug and other escapades but she’s very smart and that probably has something to do with it- so take heart.
-She could literally scream for hours on a car ride.-
My second child, a boy, could also scream for hours. My mother laughed and said, “oh, it just seems like hours.”
But she was wrong. I clocked him. He screamed for over two hours once and only quit because he went hoarse. Our solution was to put him in a room alone, but this got us in trouble when we lived in an apartment. I was thrilled when we rented our first house and we didn’t have to worry about the neighbors complaining.
Sometimes your children must be more afriaid of you than the dark, no matter if you feel horible when you think about their little cute faces.
Our 3 yo can climb almost anything! The other two were not as active, that way. They are all different and they keep you on your toes for sure!
Be firm. Have rules and stick to them.
And know, this too shall pass…..
And yes, some do get clingy.
Also, with discipline, for a toddler which I assume would be time out maybe a smack on the bum in certain cases, has to be consistant. Forewarning, sometimes the behavior gets MUCH worse before it gets better. After over I know 1,000 time outs for our 3yo, I think he finally gets the fact when he screams at the top of his lungs, he will go right to time out. Too bad if his favorite show is on.
Stick with it.