Hahahahahahahaaaa, please tell me you jumped straight to this chapter in the hopes I’d give you some tips on how to control your toddler.
No.
Toddlers are the only humans on the planet who won’t be controlled.
Babies? Yeah, babies are pretty dumb, to be honest. Firstly, they can’t move very well so you can sit them in a corner, give them a block and you’re in control.
Older kids? Harder, for sure, but you can use logic and reason and if that doesn’t work you can use bribes and threats. But most importantly, they can talk properly and you can discuss things with them.
Toddlers? No.
They can move, which is significant, so physically controlling them is out—and as we’ve established, they have zero sense of self-preservation so this can be a crippling flaw in the system.
They’re also smart enough to have opinions about life and how they want to live it but they’re utterly insane so their opinions are bull and usually dangerous.
Parents of toddlers are often judged (usually by people who don’t have children) for what looks like them letting their toddler behave like an outlaw. But ‘controlling’ a toddler is not quite as straightforward as those people might think.
Parents might be able to contain, distract or, if they have advanced skills, manipulate their toddler’s behaviour, but control? No. They will not be controlled.
The reason is: toddlers want to fight. From the minute they open their eyes to the minute they close them—and they’ll fight about closing them—they want to fight you.
They’re on the defence all day long because their lives are filled with NO. And, to be fair, it’s a pretty rotten life to live when every desire you have is thwarted (with reason, sure, but still, it can’t be fun). So they fight absolutely every decision you make, because, well, it wasn’t their decision.
So parents of toddlers have two choices. They can argue with their toddlers all day long and live in a house of misery—or they can pick their battles.
Because when all you do is say ‘no’ to a toddler, they stop hearing it, because that’s just that thing you say. But when you save it for when it really matters, you’ve got a better chance of them paying attention.
When you see a two year old in line at the post office, wearing a helmet and a swimming costume? That mother has wisely picked her battles today. Sure mate, great outfit choice, not worth the fight at all.
What people who have no experience with toddlers don’t understand is that dealing with a toddler requires patience, creativity, and an insider’s knowledge on how much worse the behaviour can get.
So, when they see a three year old at a restaurant, standing on his chair and dumping fistfuls of rice on the table, they might think, ‘Tut, what an arsehole, we would NEVER let our child behave like that. Why won’t she tell him to sit down?’. But what they don’t know—what they can’t understand—is that mother is doing an amazing job of Containing The Situation because she knows that what her child really wants to do is get down off that chair, run a few laps of the restaurant, scream a little bit and then set fire to something.
So what those childfree people should be thinking is THANK YOU. THANK YOU for letting us all eat in peace. THANK YOU for distracting your child with a smaller, less destructive crime. THANK YOU for knowing that forcing a toddler to sit and be still for longer than ten minutes is torture and will likely end in an almighty tantrum.
So, thanks for the judgement and opinions, but toddlers are usually not being naughty, they’re just being CHILDREN. We need to stop expecting kids to act like adults. They’re not adults, they’re kids. And sure, kids can be arseholes—toddlers are the biggest arseholes of them all—but we shouldn’t have to keep them locked up at home like criminals. They need to learn how to behave in public and that means being out in public, right next to you and your unreasonable expectations.