Understanding how your toddler behaves…..

The balance between dependence and independence

A toddler is no longer a baby, feeling himself as part of you, using you as his controller, the mirror in which he sees himself and the world. But he is not yet a child either; ready to see you as a person in your own right and to take responsibility for himself and his own actions in relation to you.

He has just begun to be aware that you and he are separate people; he does not yet take it comfortably for granted. Some of the time he asserts this new-found individuality, yelling "No!" and "Let me!", fighting your control and his own need for your help each time an issue presents itself. But some of the time he clings to you, crying when you leave the room, holding up his arms to be carried, demanding with open mouth that you should feed him.

His in-between behaviour is confusing for you, but it is painful for him. He has to become a person in his own right, but it feels safer to remain your possession. He has to begin to reject your total control over him yet it is easier to accept it. He has to develop likes and dislikes of his own and to pursue his own ends even when they conflict with yours, yet the conflict feels desperately dangerous to him. He still loves you with an unrivalled passion, depending on you totally for emotional support.

The developmental imperative of independence conflicts with the emotional imperative of love. He needs your love and approval, but his drive to grow up will not allow him to accept them at the price of too much dependence. But if you expect him to change overnight into what he will be -- a sensible child -- he will feel himself inadequate. He needs your help and comfort and if they are withheld from him, he cannot manage. Babied, he is difficult. Pushed on, he is whiny.

Finding the middle road

There is a middle road which allows your toddler to adventure but insures him against disaster; helps him to try but cushions his failures; gives him a firm framework for acceptable behaviour yet pads it so that it can contain him without bruising his dawning sense of being his own boss.

Finding that middle road depends on understanding some aspects of toddlers' development that are not always obvious, and on refusing to be fooled by appearances. In many ways your two-year-old seems much more grown up than he feels. His walking, his talking and his play develop to a point where outwardly he seems little different from a three-year-old, but his inward understanding and his experience do not match up to them. If you treat him as a baby, you will hold him back. He must come to understand. He must learn by experience. But if you treat him as you would treat a preschool child, you put him under intolerable pressure. He must be helped to understand. He must have experience made manageable.

Learning from experience

Your toddler has a memory, of course, but while he may remember people and places and songs and smells as well as you do yourself, his memory for some kinds of details is still very short. When he was a baby, doing baby things, this was neither very important nor very obvious. But now he is trying to do more grown up things, it is both vital and conspicuous. Day after day he trips and tumbles over the step between kitchen and living room. Wild with irritation and plagued by worry over the bumps on his head, you wonder whether he will ever learn. He will, but it will take time. He cannot "bear that step in mind" until repeated experience has etched it into his memory. When he was a baby it would have been your job to prevent him tumbling. When he is a child it will be your job to point the step out to him. But right now your job is to modify the painful potential of that series of experiences and to jog that memory. You may need to pad the step and issue endless reminders.

Learning to think ahead

Just as your toddler's memory of events in the past is selective, so is his capacity for forethought. Although he can anticipate your work-day departure from the briefcase in your hand, he cannot anticipate the results of his own behaviour. If he can climb that step-ladder, he will do so without thinking ahead to the problem of how to get down again. Often difficulties with memory and with forethought combine to get him into trouble. He has been scolded again and again for playing with the buttons on the television set, but as he approaches it again today neither the memory of past scoldings nor anticipation of the new one that is coming is strong enough to give him pause. Those buttons demand to be pressed. They draw him like a magnet. It is because your toddler cannot think ahead that he cannot wait a second for anything. If he wants it at all, he wants it now and the yelling begins even as he watches you remove the wrapper from the longed-for ice-pop. If waiting for things he likes is difficult for him, putting up with even minor discomfort now, in order to be more comfortable later is impossible. Wailing with misery because the ice-pop has made him so sticky, he will still fight off the washcloth that brings relief. Most of the time he is still a creature of this moment only.

Learning to consider feelings

Immaturities in toddler thinking may get him into trouble in his relationships with people, too. He loves you. Everyone tells you that he loves you. He tells you that he loves you, and when you get that big hug, wicked grin or contented chuckle, you know he loves you. Yet it may be quite rare for him to behave in the ways we adults think of as "loving". He cannot put himself in your place or see things through your eyes. He will hate it if you cry but it will be the feelings your tears arouse in him which he dislikes, not the feelings the tears represent in you. It is not his job yet to consider other people's feelings, he has to come to terms with his own first. If he bites you and you bite him back to "show him what it feels like", he will howl his hurt and outrage as if biting was a totally new idea to him. He makes no connection between what he did to you and what you then did to him; between your feelings and his own.

The key to understanding your toddler lies in understanding the development of his thought processes. It is only as these mature that those conflicting emotions and misleading abilities can come together to form the reasonable and manageable whole we call a child.

Copyright © 2007