Parenting Toddlers by Darylynn Starr Rank

Toddlers, toddlers, toddlers. The time when the kids are cute, adorable, and endlessly fascinating to watch as they explore their world - as well as utterly, exhuberantly, and completely out of control, as they explore their world. The two seem to go hand in hand. 

They're running around -  and falling down. Drinking successfully from a glass - and spilling their milk every other time they reach for it. Practicing language skills, stringing words or sentences together in ways that melt your heart, or make you roar with laughter -  and screaming at the top of their lungs (enough to make you fear for the delicacy of  your eardrums) everywhere and anywhere they want. Cute and adorable, and out of control.

The big difficulty, of course, is figuring out what's 'developmentally appropriate'. Is 'this' okay for them to be doing, natural and expected, important for their learning and growing?  Or is it something you need to worry about and nip in the bud? Without squelching their spirit, of course.

Parenting -- how to encourage the good stuff, so children learn to be powerful and competent and independent, while guiding them into and through the limits they need to understand -- without squooshing them. That's the lovely way we try to figure out how to do it these days. 

Times truly have changed. A friend of mine told me about an encounter she had when her kids were two and four (they're on either side of twenty now). She was in the food fair at  the Granville Market, a noisy, rambunctious sort of place. And the boys were having the best of times: running around, racing their toy cars, just like kids are supposed to do.

An older woman, very agitated, approached my friend and admonished her fiercely. Said, ''In all my years, travelling around the world, I've never seen such misbehaviour,". Can you imagine? These days, seeing kids behaving this way in public is commonplace, but clearly it wasn't always so. My friend still remembers this experience with dismay. 

Food's another one of those issues that have changed a lot when dealing with children. In several directions, actually. But one of my favourite stories comes from another friend. 

She's the kind who believes that children will eat when they're hungry; that they'll fundamentally take care of their food needs if they're given the freedom to do it the way they want to.  So she never forced her kids to eat. And, generally, they ate just fine.  Except for two very specific weeks every year. 

During those two weeks, the family went to visit grandma and grandpa. Now grandma and grandpa didn't think the same way. They thought getting your kids to eat a full meal each and every time they sat down at the table was practically the most important thing a parent could do. So that's what they did with their grandkids. They urged and cajoled, insisted, even bullied them a bit, so the kids would eat. 

Almost immediately the kids fought back. Stopped eating almost entirely. The two week visit became a gladiatorial tournament, with grandma and grandpa providing the entertainment.  They would sing songs, dance dances. They'd pull out the guitars and violins. Anything to entertain the kids (read bribe) enough, so they would eat. Heck, they even tried money. 

Upon their return home, it always took the kids a couple of weeks to get back to normal.

Parenting toddlers is an endless challenge, with endless possiblities. Parents need to find their own balance between 'exploring their own world' of parenting, but doing it without feeling 'completely out of control'.

Take care, all.

Darylynn Starr Rank (psychologist/writer) works part-time for Family Services of Greater Vancouver as a group facilitator. Her articles appear bi-weekly in The Record (New Westminster) and the Richmond Review.

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