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A number of recent workshops
with parents of toddlers produced the following list of ideas
and key points to keep in mind when facing the challenge of
parenting children whose life space is dramatically expanding
but whose verbal skills and concepts of time, place, and
consequences are still quite limited.
Visual aids are very helpful in
establishing the sense of sequence and time for the behaviors
required to start and end the day. Charts with drawings or
pictures that have clock faces next to them enable the child to
more quickly grasp the specific steps needed to complete the
process but also begin to learn the importance of sequence and
time in completing complex tasks. Parents must remember how
complicated getting ready to leave the house is for a 2 year
old. There are so many steps to be mastered and so-o-o many
distractions. Plus, "What's a '5 minutes'?". We talk
time to very young children which is one of the most abstract
concepts in life.
Speaking of time, transitions
are another major challenge for young children. At the end of a
workshop, one mother went into the classroom to get her child
and go home. The child resisted. The mother had been mentally
preparing to leave. The child had not. Children need warnings,
often a few of them, to begin to wind down and finish an
activity. Toddlers will often need the parent to enter the
activity in order to ease the child out of it. Making a game of
cleaning up or creating an ending helps as does distractions
that begin to shift the child's attention to change and
transition. It can be helpful to talk about what will be
happening when you leave, especially if it involves the child
in actively making some decision about what will happen at the
next stop, e.g., what book she would like you to read that
night.
More about time goals: use
timers to give children a visual, concrete focus and often make
a game out of it. Can you brush your teeth or get your clothes
on before the bell rings? One mother had success laying out
options of sets of outfits plus beating the timer for a child
who was having a lot of trouble getting dressed in the morning.
Parents also need to be careful of taking too much
responsibility for getting the child ready in the morning.
Taking a child to preschool in his/her pajamas with clothes in
a bag is often a very powerful way to underscore that you
cannot control your child's behavior but you can control
consequences. If you get drawn into believing that it is up to
you to make sure everything is in perfect order before leaving
than your toddler is training you rather than vice versa.
Whenever you are trying to say
something important to a young child, kneel down and say it
softly, eye-to-eye. Parents often attempt to give
directions/orders/make requests from a distal position rather
than a proximal one. But very young children cannot focus their
auditory sense on a distant object when it is competing with an
ongoing tactile or visual experience. Don't call out from the
next room and expect more than about two seconds of attention.
Even being next to a child but emitting words that are more
than three feet from the ears, and more importantly, without
the requisite visual or tactile attention, limits your
effectiveness in getting attention and getting the message
across. Even with older children in a classroom, a teacher
walking about the room simply touching the shoulder of an
inattentive child can dramatically improve being heard.
A biting 2 year old? Eye-to-eye
- a very firm "No!", immediate BUT quiet removal, and
consistent repetition. Don't waste time lecturing toddlers!
A toddler being mean to a new
baby. Again the eye-to-eye "No!", but this time you
should add a brief comment that it IS hard to have to share
attention with a new baby, while you pick up the baby and go
off, negating the toddler's attempt to gain negative attention
by having you focus on punishing him.
Distraction is one of the most
helpful strategies. Also parents need to use their knowledge
and anticipate situations when a toddler may have difficulty or
cause a problem, e.g., the child who interrupts whenever you
are on the phone or the slow-to-warm up child who resists or
runs out of patience in a group activity. Always have some
interesting object that will hold the child's attention for a
few minutes (an object not otherwise available for the child to
play with) or have a favorite book and read to the child for a
little while until she is able to enter or re-enter the social
situation. One mother, whose son was physically hitting
children in group play, realized the child would give her a
clue by coming over and clinging when he couldn't tolerate the
intensity of the social play of the other children. Her son
needed a time out, in a positive sense, and once they worked
out the signals, she would call him over for some quiet time
before an incident occurred.
Some toddlers have
hypersensitive sensory systems. They react with distress to
loud noises, can't tolerate physical closeness (don't relax
when you hold them; lash out when children are suddenly in
their face), reject foods and clothing that don't "feel
right" in their mouths or against their skin. These are
valid issues. Treat them as such by developing accommodations
and not worrying they won't turn out all right.
Toilet training is a constant
concern when it need not be. Gently encourage the child when
she appears to be interested but if not ready, be patient. It
will occur in due time. And loss of control is quite common.
Don't expect once mastered that the issue is forever gone.
Hyper children are a challenge
to get to sleep. They have difficulty calming their systems to
the point of being able to fall asleep. They will need more
gentle rocking, sucking, and rhythmic sounds as aids to falling
asleep and are less likely to be able to fall back to sleep if
they wake up during the night. Try brief interventions but the
reality is that some children will need your bodily presence to
regain control of their own biological rhythm.
Keep in mind that toddlers are
not in training to be miniature adults. Parents and teachers
often put too much stress on training very young children to
cope by using words when developmentally they are more skilled
at learning to cope through action and tactile/visual
modalities. Let them be toddlers. And enjoy the process. It
really passes very quickly.
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