I’ve had few interactions with parents of toddlers, where the parent didn’t make some reference to how bad their child was. I’m choosing to focus this post on toddlers because, I do believe they are the most misunderstood age group. Additionally, it is the age that behaviors that can be really frustrating begin to develop. It is also the stage where physical discipline typically begins in the average home. I’ll share a story that led to my search for understanding my toddler and what turned everything around.
I’ll be honest with you, I felt a bit frustrated by parenting apps and articles that seemed to have a one-size fits all approach to parenting. How and where my daughter should sleep, what she should eat and at what age, what the daily schedule should look like. Lyric broke ALL of the rules. She refused to sleep on her back. She expressed interest in solids and water at 4 months. Everything I read said wait until 6 months. I only got sleep when she slept next to me. I was working full time at the time, and out of the house 12-13 hours of the day, with a 30 mile commute each way. Sleep was important to me. My husband works evenings and was caring for her in the morning when I was at work. Due to his schedule, she slept until 10 or 11 am most days. Nothing we were doing fit into the mainstream recommendations. So instead of continually panicking and guilting myself, I took a stance at some point, to just do what felt natural to me, and to give Lyric what she needed and whatever ensured a full night’s sleep for me, regardless of what the “experts” said. I pretty much deleted all of the parenting apps and decided to fly solo. This is probably why I was caught off guard when the toddler behaviors began.
When Lyric was around 15 months old, I made a career change that I can share more about at another time, that allowed me to mostly work from home. When Lyric was around 18 months old, I was with her all morning as my husband slept, due to his evening work schedule. I’ll be honest with you, I don’t remember everything that happened that morning, but I know it involved multiple clean ups and a feeling of absolute helplessness and failure. I don’t remember what happened right before, but I remember taking Lyric up to our bedroom covered in some kind of food, handing her to my husband whom I’d just woken up and said, “I need a break.” I came back downstairs and sobbed as I cleaned up whatever mess Lyric had created during the meal. It really was a breaking point for me. As a former educator and school leader, I knew not to blame the behavior on a child. There is always a cause. But having spent most of my career with elementary school kids in underserved communities, I was used to the causes being external factors beyond a child’s control— trauma, neglect, change in life circumstance. I was completely clueless as to what the cause was for these toddler behaviors that seemed to come out of nowhere. But I was committed to finding out.
Before I get into the science behind toddlers, I want to address the messages out there that I believe contribute to people’s assumptions that toddlers are bad. The phrase, “Spare the rod, spoil the child” is a quote taken from a 17th century poem titled, “Hudibras” but is often misattributed to the Bible. Proverbs 13:24 actually says, “He who spare the rod hates his son, but he who loves him is careful to discipline him.” In my experience, this phrase and its interpretation has typically been what’s brought conversations about this topic with people to an end. In these conversations, the mothers have felt like suggesting anything other than physical discipline was essentially blasphemous— against God, and therefore not worthy of consideration.
I know that when a life choice is based on a religious belief, it’s deep, personal and supersedes any other point of view. But here is one to consider. In Spare the Kids, Stacy Patton says, “The Bible is not condoning the beating of a child. The original Hebrew word for “rod” is shebet, which is a shepherd’s crook. In Hebrew culture, the rod was used to guide and protect sheep and to ward off wolves. It was a symbol of loving guidance, leadership, wisdom, and protection from outside harm. That verse suggests a more thoughtful way of disciplining children than simply hitting them.”
According to a survey cited in Spare the Kids, “…almost 50 percent of blacks were influenced more by their faith and religious leaders than by the input of pediatricians and child-care professionals or parenting information from books, magazines, websites, and television shows.” The reason why this is important to this topic is that, the interpretation that the rod is for physical discipline, is all born out of the notion that children are born inherently evil. The term, “beat the devil out of him”, is derived from this ideology, and is meant quite literally, if you follow this line of thinking. This ideology is not limited to people of color.
In looking for some concrete data on when the average family starts implementing physical discipline, I came across this article from No Greater Joy Ministries, that recommends starting physical discipline at 6 months old—using the example of a baby who attempts to throw his food on the floor. This article actually made my heart race as it described that a toddler who is not physically disciplined or trained in the way that they recommend, “…is beyond reasoning. He is a hardened, hedonistic heathen, steeped in fleshly practices and convinced that the world is centered around him. In the first three years, he has developed a worldview that puts him at the center and makes gratification the chief end of his life. By default, he has learned that people exist to please him; after all, that has been the order of things for all three years of his life.” This article is mixed with things that sort of sound reasonable, so a person who doesn’t know what the brain research has revealed about toddlers, would easily be convinced by this opinion-based article. I, personally, could not go through the life-changing experience of birthing a child and look into those bright eyes and believe that she was evil. This ideology is the driving force behind many people’s parenting choices. This notion of a self-involved, selfish toddler is not rare. Patton quotes a number of pastors delivering this message to their parishioners.
In the secular world, you typically hear about the terrible twos. Many moms have warned me that three year olds are worse. Up to this point, you may have drawn your opinions about young children from one of these two worlds. If you’re here, I’m hoping it’s because you’re ready to hear something different about the nature of toddlers.
One of the first books I read was, How Toddlers Thrive, by Tovah Klein. After reading the first chapter, I was already in a much better place to handle my daughter’s behavior. Honestly, I’d love to include the entire chapter here, but I will include a lengthy passage because I think it is vitally important to understand before you are ready to implement any discipline strategies or techniques.
“As toddlers emerge from infancy, their brains are just beginning to develop the structures that manage vitally important functions. …we have a basic understanding of some of the pieces that make the toddler years both critical for lifetime well being and success and at the same time challenging to parents or adults who care for young children.
It is important to understand that there are three “processing centers” in the brain, and they are all interconnected and yet distinct. At the bottom of the brain is the area that controls breathing, heartbeat, and other automatic functions: the things that keep us alive. The middle section of the brain is the emotional center. All sensations and experiences travel through this part before going to our highest, thinking level of the brain, the cortex. It is important to know that the two lower centers of our brain are wired much earlier and more completely than our cortex. They also fire much faster.
Toddlers often feel the full force of an emotional response without having the ability to rationally “think” their way out of it. Through the toddler years, connections are being made between the higher level of the brain and the emotional centers. In fact, this is the most important learning and wiring occurring in toddler brain development. But connections take years (many!) to create and become automatic.”
At the brain level, the prefrontal cortex (that part of the brain’s architecture that supports regulation and the main executive functions) is very much still developing at birth and even well through adolescence and into early adulthood. The infant is fully dependent on the caregiver to calm them and help them regulate. Toddlers, thanks to a combination of these gradually developing structures in the frontal lobe, coupled with their growing desire for independence, start to handle life a bit more on their own—but they still rely on us. As a parent, you know this, because children, at around age two, first push back with their own ideas and preferences with a mind of their own. The difficulty arises because toddlers have their own ideas at a time when these brain structures are only beginning to develop; they still have a long way to go before they will be fully on board and useful. Which is why toddlers do not yet have a well-developed brain capacity for thinking through situations, for controlling emotions or behavior, for acting “politely” or stopping behaviors they should not be doing, for making decisions or knowing what is right or wrong. Yet these abilities are a work in progress—and they will, with proper support and attention from us, improve as the brain matures. At this point in time, you, the parent, act as their organizer and regulator. Later, the child will be able to do it for themselves.”
Something else that’s important to note is that there are 4 stages of brain development. 0-5 years old, 6-11years old, 12-17 years old, and 18-24 years old. The first and third are the most unstable in terms of brain development and hormonal changes, are similar in a number of ways, and tend to be the most challenging for parents. It also means that, though we don’t typically look at them in this way, 5-year-olds are still considered toddlers, in terms of what’s happening to their brains.
The understanding that toddlers feel emotions fully and deeply but don’t have the reasoning capacity to determine whether or not their reaction is appropriate or not, explained so much for me. It is the full explanation for tantrums.
Simone Davies says in The Montessori Toddler, “Toddlers are not giving us a hard time. They are having a hard time. When we realize their difficult behavior is actually a cry for help, we can ask ourselves, How can I be of help right now? We move from feeling attacked to searching for a way to be supportive”.
I follow a few gentle parenting social media accounts. In one of them recently, I read, “Behavior is communication.” This understanding will help you to start asking the right questions. Instead of looking for external sources to tell you how to discipline your child and to correct their perceived misbehaviors, you can start to view the world through the eyes of a toddler that doesn’t have reasoning abilities.
Here are a few concrete examples of what this looks like in my home. A behavior that triggered my frustration, and still does, is Lyric throwing food on the floor at meal time. I spent a lot of useless energy addressing this behavior with a stern tone, not seeing a lot of change in the behavior from meal to meal. But boy was I fed up with cleaning her mess. After reading about several toddler schemas, or urges that I’ll discuss in more detail in another blog post, I realized that I was the one that needed to make some changes.
First, since she was able to independently feed herself, I thought that meant that I could get some dishes done, or multi-task as she ate. This often gave her the space to make the messes that drove me nuts. I now know that she is in a developmental stage that urges her to experiment and see cause and effect. This almost always translates to dropping food onto the floor to see what sound it makes or if it bounces, rolls or splashes. I now know that this is also part of the trajectory schema. I also learned that toddlers also like order and repetition. This plays out differently for different children, but foods, touching, broken, presented on a new plate or with new cutlery, can lead to big feelings for a toddler. Being full and wanting to get up, can create another emotion. Without the ability to reason that these things are not really life-altering, they result in undesirable behaviors.
So now, I pay attention to what she is communicating with me in order to prevent or intercept the behavior that she in unable to control. Here are a few examples:
· One day in Target, I had one of Lyric’s favorite snacks in a zip loc bag, pretzel chips. As I pushed her in the shopping cart she requested the snack. I handed her one at a time. Not every time, but repeatedly she’d take the chip, but then throw it on the floor. In my frustration, I told her that she couldn’t have any more and that led to a break down. Tears and screaming that I had to deal with until I was able to distract her with something else. What I now know, is that Lyric had an issue with broken pretzel chips. She only wanted whole ones. She had been throwing the broken ones on the floor. So now, I pack her pretzel chips in Tupperware to reduce the risk of them breaking. I addressed the cause in order to prevent the behavior.
· I now pay close attention to food that should not touch on her plate. I’ve observed her strategically scoop one food out of one section of the plate and onto the floor or at other times, into another section of her plate before she will begin eating. Though I stop her from throwing the food, if I understand what’s causing her frustration, I will re-order the food in a way that suits her, or model that she can put what she doesn’t not want on a napkin that I keep nearby.
· When Lyric is done eating, she inconsistently communicates that to us. I’ve learned that towards the end of a meal, I need to sit close by, because there is a fine line between her last bite and when the food she’s too full to eat will land on the floor or end up in her cup. When I see this behavior I say, “It looks like you’re all done, let’s clean up.” As she gets older, she’s helping more and more with clean up.
· One day I handed Lyric her re-usable food pouch with a yogurt and strawberry combo that she loves. I unscrewed the cap and handed it to her. She looked at it for a moment then said “no” and I caught it just before she had a chance to launch it across the room. Because I’m getting better at this, I realized immediately that the cap that she watched me unscrew was a different color than the one I usually use. I told her I was going to go get her another one. I came back in the room with the cap she was used to, and she took it without a problem.
I hope that what these examples illustrate, is why there is no simple answer when someone asks, “How do I discipline my child? She’s so bad.” Same child, same behavior, all with different antecedents and responses from me. None of the situations warranted a disciplinary consequence, because she lacks the regulatory functioning abilities to act or communicate in a way that is deemed rational, from an adult perspective.
1. I try to figure out what’s driving the behavior. I address the cause whenever possible.
2. I acknowledge the frustration she may be experiencing. “I see you don’t like when your peas touch your rice. Let’s put them in a different section of your plate. Sometimes acknowledgement can completely change the direction of a meltdown, particularly with older toddlers. Saying, “It’s not a big deal… It’s only… It’s just…” does not help. And now that you know that in their minds, IT IS a big deal, you may be able to respond with more empathy and bring the situation to a peaceful end sooner.
3. I narrate the behavior I want to see. “We have to keep food on our plate/ table”. Lecturing doesn’t help. But you can always state the expectation clearly and briefly.
The opposite of punishment, is not letting your child do whatever they want. It’s addressing the cause of behavior, in order to stop or prevent it, in a non-punitive way. What sense does it make to punish a behavior that is perfectly reasonable—for someone working with a brain that is still “under construction”. When my daughter was younger, I might say, “I’m going to hold on to your plate while I clean up these peas off of the floor because I don’t want you to throw any more.” Now, I let her know that she’s going to help me sweep the spilled peas after the meal is over. They are natural consequences. Even as adults, we clean up after ourselves when we make a mess. Additionally, she actually loves the independence of using her child-size broom and dustpan. She’s not willing to help every single time, but narrating what happens when there is a mess, whether I clean it or she helps, is a routine she’s starting to understand. Just the other day, I saw her run for her dustpan and broom. Unfortunately, it was because she’d scooped a handful of dirt from one of our potted plants. But independently, she knew it was necessary to clean up her mess. Ultimately , that is the point of this parenting style— to raise a confident child, who eventually will act independently, not only when threatened or out of fear. This requires patience and a lot of repetition on the part of the parent.
The food examples are simple quick fixes, that took my observation and willingness to get into the mind of my child to resolve. However, there are times when the behaviors are more extreme, because the cause is more significant from anyone’s perspective. That means, once discovered and addressed, it may take longer to see a change in behavior.
I have only touched the surface of this conversation, and will dig deeper in upcoming posts, but hope that it is a start for you to start re-thinking how you see your child’s behavior. This shift in thinking requires patience and practice. But who deserves this effort on your part more than your children?
