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Wednesday, January 11, 2006 - (see all news for this day)
the strength of will of toddlers - 01:15 PM
(filed under 'smiley')
before i had smiley, & before he became a toddler with his own will & his own wishes, i used to believe that as the parent you would stand fast on what you wanted for the child, no matter what the child wanted & how much they wanted it .. but it turns out that's not always possible.
i used to wonder why parents that talked of their child not eating this or that thing which is good for them, or not wanting to wear this or that item of clothing when it's freezing cold outside, or giving in to their child's wishes to get a lolly while at the corner shop, didn't just stand firm & tell the child, "no. you can't have that," or, "no. you must wear this," etc.
in real life though, it doesn't work that way.
when you want to take your kid for a walk (because he's driving you crazy & a change of scene is the only thing that'll make him stop headbuttng/biting/hitting you) & it's cool outside, yet he refuses to wear a jumper, you can't just let him tanty it out on the floor while you struggle to get the jumper over his head & flailing arms. if you do manage to get the jumper on him, then he'll still be throwing himself around & you'll barely be able to carry him out the door without dropping him or doing him or yourself some sort of injury. if you do manage to get him out the door, then people would think you're murdering your child because of the screaming going on. it's simply not worth the trouble.
in the end, it's easier just to take him outside in the cold with the jumper against his back as close to covering him as you can, sneaking it further & further up his back until he notices & pushes it back down saying, "jumper? off?" in that way that he says everything as though it's a question.
it's the same with the lollies. aside from it being easier to not take him to the shop at all when you just want to duck out to get milk (thus the times when you sneak off when you swore you would never do that to your child), if he insists that he wants that "green lollipop?" over & over & over & over & over & over (you get the drift) & each time you say "no lollipop" he gets angrier & angrier & you give in before he starts kicking his legs around & knocking everything in the tiny corridor off the shelves & so you end up trying to pick up things from the floor while dealing with an angry child & wondering what on earth people (without children) will be thinking of this scene.
sometimes you can get him to do what's best.
you can brush his teeth, despite having to pin him down on the bed where he won't hurt himself with his thrashing about, his legs stuck between yours & his arms held with your free hand while you try to force the toothbrush as gently as possible into his tightly shut mouth (although still managing to scream loudly through closed lips), sometimes resorting to blocking his nose just so that he'll open his mouth, then actually managing to get the tooth brush onto all sides of each tooth, even if for only a second.
you can get him to put on his shoes, even if it takes fifteen minutes of him saying, "no?" (again, the question thing) until he finally gets it that the only way you'll be going for the walk, the walk that he wants to go on, is if he's wearing shoes .. & then you end up carrying him the whole time anyway.
you can get him to eat healthy food, even if you end up eating the whole damn banana yourself to try to show him that it really is yummy (& you're not actually all that keen on bananas anyway) & then he decides that he wants an apple instead. when he eats the apple, he then wants to spit out every bit of skin after chewing on it for a good amount of time (at least you now know this is going to happen & you can get a tissue instead of him spitting warm, slimy, crushed up apple skin straight into your hand) when previously he had no problem with apple skin. so you end up peeling it because at least he's eating part of the apple.
it's not always that difficult, but these are the times which stand out in your memory, even if just for how inventive you have to be to actually get the job done. thank goodness they start out relatively small & as they get bigger you can begin to reason with them instead. can you imagine trying to force your will upon a creature as cantankerous as a toddler if they were as big as full grown adults? scary thought ..
surely i'm not the only one that does these seemingly terrible things to make sure that my child doesn't grow up with brown, rotting teeth, pneumonia & scurvy? i'm sure it's only children-less people that would think these methods are simply dreadful. people like what i used to be like. it's tough to do what's best for your child. all you can do is laugh. if you don't laugh you might throw them off the balcony instead.
we call that the terrible twos. It will get better until the teens that when they seem to know it all. Ah the life of a parent
gee, the tooth brushing routine sounds like it should be an olympic event. patience, real girl, the terrible twos shall pass.
Heh, I appreciate your honesty on these matters, it lets us non-child-having (yet!) folk know what we're in for/
well the contrariness is just what kids do i think, but i was going to say that stephanie suddenly went through a stage when she wouldn't eat the skin of the apple when she was a bit younger, maybe it's some kind of wierd but common kid phase thing? she eats it now. that may partly have to do with the fact that i told her i was NOT going to peel the apple for her and she could either eat the whole thing or be hungry.
yeah, and they may be terrible twos, I'm not sure about three's, maybe they're just terrible continued, but then they get to fours. that starts with f and isn't something you should say in front of your child.
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can you imagine trying to force your will upon a creature as cantankerous as a toddler
It's called a teenager