Doodles! Man, my kids loved The Tweenies.
Be sure to check out the Cbeebies website as they have loads of stuff on there - I’d sit Littlebum and Bruiser on my lap to play the games. Littlebum mastered using a mouse before she was two, while Bruiser had more of a mash evey key and see what happens technique.
Remaining calm and speaking quietly and calmly has been the best trick for us, although obviously that has its limits. Choosing your battles is also excellent advice.
When we get really desperate we pull out the iPhone and let her watch videos (Sesame Street, TMBG and Peppa Pig, mostly) while we dress her/change her/ strap her into the pushchair. Video distraction is not something we like to do (because we’re trying to minimize the “TV babysitting” thing) but it works. Plus she’s learned the word “conifer” from them which is hilarious coming from a two-year-old.
Very interesting thread! I’ve got a headstrong 11 month old, so I’ve ordered both recommended books in the hopes I can brush up on a few skills before she get’s a lot older…
IME you can’t explain that to a 15 month old, but a 15 month old can easily catch on to the pattern “when we’ve just awakened, mom never gives in on this” and “when it’s late in the day or when it’s that long stretch of day where nobody goes to work or anything, mom lets me run around in just a diaper.”
Just to provide a note of dissent–while Happiest Baby on the Block was GREAT for Josie, Happiest Toddler was a total miss. The “Toddlerese” of getting down on their level and repeating what they want back to them until they listen just got her to cry harder–I think she thought I was taunting her. Meanwhile, distraction, which Dr. Karp says is terrible, works perfectly for her.
I think Dr. Harp, bless his heart, really underestimates the intellectual capacity of toddlers. He seems to think they’re big babies, who need us to tell them what they’re feeling. Bullocks. They know quite well what they’re feeling, thank you! A single, “I understand you’re feeling frustrated, but my car is leaving in 5 minutes. You can be in it in clothes or in your pajamas.”* is really all they need to know they’ve been heard and understood…and still aren’t going to derail our morning with their antics.
*Yes, I really did that once. I called her teacher the night before and told her the plan, and she loved it. I carried along an easy to put on dress. When the kiddo got to daycare, I left as usual, handing my daughter the dress. And all the teacher said was, “We wear clothes in the classroom, so I’ll see you when you’ve changed into your clothes!” and pointed to the bathroom for her to change in. She missed Circle Time and the Morning Song, it took her so long to get over her outrage and pull a dress on, and so she never hesitated over the getting clothes on before the car left again!
Freakin’ awesome. How old was she?
I grew up watching my mother giving my little sister ultimatums and then backing down / wimping out day after day after day. Perfect recipe for domestic disharmony, especially with an iron-willed kid like my sister. I will NOT do that to my son.
I’m finding so much respect for my parents now.
My mother is the queen of picking battles.
She didn’t care what we wore as long as we were clean and covered, so we chose our own clothing- my 4 year old sister went to school for the first time in a pair of cherry red Doc Martin boots, I spent much of my childhood in red boys’ overalls and my other sister wore only blue for a year. In my mother’s words " I’m your mother, not your stylist and you were kids, not fashion models- you were warm and clean, so who cares".
She didn’t care if we left the restaurant table to check out the hand dryer in the ladies’ room every 15 minutes (we were fascinated by them for some reason)- as long as we were quiet, and behaved impeccably at the table.
We could decorate our bedrooms however we wanted, as long as we kept them tidy.
I also now see that some of my parents’ rules which seemed stupid at the time make perfect sense.
“Only daddy buys sweets, and only on Saturdays”= there is no point in asking mum during the weekly shopping trip on Thursday.
“You can do whatever it is you want to if you can give me 10 good reasons why you should and 10 good reasons why you shouldn’t”-we either never got enough reasons or worked out for ourselves why what we wanted to do was a bad idea.
Got to try out the extra dining receptacle tonight- food started out on the plate, and got moved to the orange bowl (our “blue plate”) with almost nothing on the floor. I like.
Oooh, I’m keeping this one. I hope I remember it long enough to use it.
Another vote for distraction.
Sometimes when one of my children would go into throw a fit mode I would walk away.
They would look to see where I was going and see me rush towards some unseen thing on the ground and bend down and " catch" it in my cupped hands.
Now, we were not outside where they have seen me catch a grasshopper or frog, or some other wonder, but there I was opening up my cupped hands a crack and peering into the opening at something, something they had to see also.
Their curiousity would make them forget what they were going off about.
Old enough to know better. 
She’d just turned four, I believe. I was lucky to have a great preschool teacher who was familiar with L&L parenting and backed me up all the way. I would have done it either way, after getting agreement from the teacher, but I was glad not to have to go into a lengthy explanation so as not to be sabotaged in the process by a teacher who might have made it her problem (“Oh, sweetie, you’re not dressed! Come on, let’s get your dress on. Please? Pretty please? Oh, come on, now…”). The whole point is that she was *capable *of dressing herself, and she had to make her own decision about that before she got to do what she wanted to. It had to be her own problem to solve, not her vs. a grownup.
And sometimes you just need to be patient and wait.
My son had one tantrum. We laughed at it (he was our first), he figured out it wasn’t working and that was that.
My daughter had them regularly, for hours, from toddlerhood until she was six or so (although by five they’d really become fairly unusual events). Timeouts would have needed duct tape to work. Logic she couldn’t listen to during a tantrum. We worked with meditation (when she was a little older) and just helping her calm down. She’s eleven now, and while she is still prone to showing her emotions too much, she is MUCH better. We are really working on “you get to choose how you present yourself, and you get to choose whether to be content or dissatisfied.”
(We took our toddlers to daycare in their jammies often. The teachers would change them around breakfast time. Although sleeping in clothes works well too - done that.)
My line to the Kidlets (and to previous generations of Kidlets) was “I have a problem in my ears, I can’t understand you if you yell,” and I’d make a show of how much my ears hurt when they yelled. Hands over ears, hunched shoulders, scrunchy face, the works. It helped with Middlebro’s amazingly-high-pitched yells, too (sometimes he wouldn’t even be throwing a tantrum, just excited, but his voice would get so high and so loud that my poor canary ended up in the floor of his cage, belly-up and twitching).
WhyNot, I really like this. I think it’s crucially important and I have a feeling I’m going to give it a LOT of thought and practice over the next few years.
Right now, though, I don’t think we’re ready for ‘I’d be happy to help you with that as soon as you calm down.’ When Widget’s having a meltdown, all that ‘if/then’ is more than she’s got room for. I think your method is definitely something we’re going to work up to, but for the moment I think all we can do is distraction and offering her the solution directly (the ‘Say “Mama, help please”’ thing).
For some reason I’m less baffled by tantrums that are aimed at getting us to do something (I guess because I know that no, we’re not going to let her put the phone charger in the sink, no matter how much she howls). The ones that are all internal, triggered by her not being able to make something work, are the ones I have a tough time with. It’s so difficult being that small.
I talk to my sister a lot about parenting. She’s got an interesting situation where her children are 11 and 14, and then is tending a step-granddaughter during the day. (Her step-daughter’s child) is now three.
My sister compares how different it’s between caring for her own children when she couldn’t bare to hear their screams, and consequently caved in a lot when they were toddlers, to tending her granddaughter, whose crying doesn’t tug on her heartstrings as much. She still lovers her and does a good job of taking care of her, but she’s just more immune to the wailing.
The girl has picked up that there are Grandma Rules, which are nonnegotiable, and she’s pretty good about keeping them. Then there are Mommy Rules, which screaming and crying can always change. I think this is where you get into trouble, because you’ve just trained them to keep on screaming.
When Beta-chan was first looking to walk, we baby-proofed the house fairly well, but couldn’t do anything about the built-in microwave / conventional oven, which is just at perfect baby height. We had to train her to not touch it. Rather than go with the “No! No!” route, I did something different. When she would touch it, I’d just say “Nope” very matter of fact, but not particularly directed at her, pick her up and take her into the other room. That was it. No lectures, no’s or getting mad.
The first couple of times she touched it, she wasn’t really aware of the connection between touching the oven and being transported into the living room. However, then she became aware and started cried a little bit but after a couple more times, she stopped trying to touch the oven. One time she went to touch it, and her hand stopped all by its tiny self in mid swing. You could see her process the thought, and then decide to not do it. After that, I don’t think she’s really tested it.
I do the same with her standing up in the high chair. If she stands up, then she’s done and gets taken off. That also didn’t take that long for her to catch on to sitting back down when Daddy says to sit.
I like this. Even if the kids think it’s stupid, it just becomes a rule which doesn’t have to be fought over all the time.
I’m glad that it worked for you as well. I think that one reason is can work is that it empowers the child, letting him/her take action, but in a way which is acceptable to the parents. After we got going with this, when Beta-chan droped food on the floor, I would just pick it up, hand it back to her and tell her to put it on Daddy’s plate, not really worrying too much about making it into a “No!” She’s good enough now, that she’ll directly give me things if the plate isn’t there.
My philosophy is to not have that many rules, so she gets a lot of freedom, but pretty firm boundaries when they are there. I don’t know how much toddlers process the explanations, and in fact, also wonder if that would just make them more frustrating. I haven’t seen anything where detailed explanations (which my wife will sometimes try) have really helped yet, and I suspect that will be down the road a little when she is more mature.
Of course, she’s often not happy with the straight no’s from me as well, so it’s not like there is any magical solutions.
I think it’s also difficult being a parent and learning to let the kids learn to deal with frustrations on their own.
Haa, Haa. It’s easy for me to say, because Beta-chan skips that frustration stage, and just asks us to do it. She does manage to be quite unhappy about some things, though. She’s really unhappy that someone else gets Mommy’s breasts now. We went through that last night.