Let’s talk about toddlers. First things first: like earlier in infancy, a young toddler is utterly dependent upon the magic of their secure attachment relationships as the foundation for all their learning, growing and development. I just gotta remind you: there is nothing more important to your young child than you are. Full stop. No toy, holiday or outing matters as much as you do. The give-and-take of conversation, the attentive nappy changes, the seemingly never-ending cycles of “provide snack, clean up, provide snack, clean up” … these are the very foundations upon which lives are built.
So … congratulations! Because you’ve made it this far. Your sweet baby is not a baby-baby anymore, and by some measures, your babe has moved into toddlerhood. And I know, people like to catastrophise the idea of life with a toddler, but don’t you despair, mama. Rejoice! Toddlers are great fun. And with a couple of tweaks to your routines and rituals, you’ll find parenting an 18-month-old just as delightful (okay, and just as exhausting!) as it was parenting a teeny baby.
Making sense of the world
Toddlers have so much work to do. They are busy. Their bodies command them to move – to climb, run, dance. They are compelled to understand the ‘how’ and ‘what’ of everything, touching the stuff you’d rather they didn’t touch and squishing the things you’d rather not know exist. All that moving and touching and squishing helps massively with the process of wiring neurons and strengthening synapses. They are still wiring brain cells together as rapidly as they were in early infancy, via those ever-changing synaptic highways, and for most of a toddler’s life thus far, the experiences of early life have supported them in wiring the lower regions of their brains. Brains which are working much harder than yours or mine!
First, in early infancy, while we are nestled in the loving arms of our parents and whānau, we experience the world via our senses. Next, as we begin to move (to roll, creep and crawl), we encounter the world through our bodies.
And now things get real. Really, really real. Because in toddlerhood, the emotional regions of the brain (sometimes called the limbic system) are driving things. So while toddlers still experience the world as they did before in those sensory and physical ways, they are now also deeply into the work of emotion.
Validating emotions
You know, sometimes I think this is why people give toddlers a hard time – all that ‘terrible twos’ nonsense I’ve written about previously in this very magazine. If any of us are carrying discomfort about emotion, we run the risk of projecting it onto these wee people. Some of us have been socialised by the wider culture to limit our own experiences of emotions, like the mother whose experience of anger was suppressed by her own upbringing, or the father whose own upbringing squashed his natural expression of sadness.
For some of us, seeing our sweet children being racked by storm clouds of emotion can be kinda triggering. It can be hard to accept a feeling in our kids that we have never allowed within ourselves. So I urge you to have as much compassion for yourself as you do for your toddler as you whisper this affirmation: “Emotion is just emotion.”
Here’s the thing: just like a storm cloud (even a heinous one, with high winds that knock out power!), an emotional cloud parked over a toddler will pass. It will pass! Bear in mind that children under the age of three have very little access to the developmental equipment we need to help us to regulate our emotion. Our higher brains, our lovely prefrontal cortexes, are what we need to regulate emotions, and they are nurtured into being slowly – right up into our mid-twenties.
Offering support
So toddlers learn to feel before they learn how to regulate those feelings. It’s like being in a car with an accelerator and no brake. Lucky for them, they are still squarely supported by the loving parents who cuddled them as tiny infants (that’s you!), and with your patience and guidance, they will continue to develop and flourish, and grow juicy cortexes to boot.
Toddlers are prone to having these emotional storms (aka ‘tantrums’!), and just as we cannot force the weather to change, we cannot force another human to stop having the emotion that they are having. What we can do is offer comfort – offering comfort is different to stopping someone crying. Providing comfort is like saying “I see that you are sad/mad/overwhelmed and I am here to be alongside you while you feel that”. That is a very different message to “Stop crying! You’re being silly! Stop it now”.
Embracing the season
Also, we can try and accommodate a child’s stage as we move through the world. When my youngest was a toddler, we took a trip abroad to see my husband’s extended family. When our cuzzies asked to meet for dinner in bars and restaurants, I risked their ire by setting up lunchtime picnic dates instead. Toddlerhood is not forever, and it doesn’t hurt to give our toddlers every opportunity to slowly, successfully learn the skills of functioning in the social world.
How to soothe your toddler’s soul
Originally published in OHbaby! magazine, issue 42, Winter 2018 Also available at https://www.ohbaby.co.nz/under-5/parenting-toddlers/the-first-1000-days-part-four-toddlerdom-and-beyond