Dear Counselor Chomp: The Nine Commandments

Dear Counselor Chomp: 

Parenthood has been a joy but now toddlerdom has begun and WOW! I wasn’t really ready for it!! My poor husband now has two control freaks in the house. Any tips?

Normally in control in NYC

Dear Normally,

By dint of the fact that I have not yet been done in by my own toddler, I will now pitch myself as an veritable Moses.

First, let’s lay out the goals of parenting during the toddler years, aside from the obvious desire to produce a perfect, indulged but not too indulged, enriched and happy child. We are taking those goals for granted. For our purposes, these are our goals:

Safety

Not Going Insane

Not Seeing Your Toddler as an Adversary

Below, you have the Nine Commandments of Managing a Toddler, which will help you achieve these three goals.

With your goals in mind, you can determine what to let slide, and how to adjust your own perspective when necessary to enjoy life when you’re getting lots of challenges.

Let me start by saying: you are going to let a whole lot slide. According to my brilliant pediatrician, who has six children of her own and yet seems very calm, choose very few battles, but those that you choose, you must win.

And that is the first commandment of parenting a toddler.

The second is that toddlers are nearly indistinguishable from Chinese finger traps, and the more you pull, the more they pull, and unless you change tactics, you will be stuck forever. Instead, stop applying pressure and take a completely different approach.

What, you might ask, is a different approach? Well, rather than negotiating the issue at hand, change the discussion. Always remember and never forget to distract, distract, distract. That might be with a different activity, or a different toy, or a verbal game, or even a different approach to the same situation. A different approach might be getting the to do something themselves, which they take pride in. See the following commandment:

Kids are struggling for independence; when possible let them to “do it ‘self.” You can even use this against desire against them to get them to start projects they wouldn’t necessarily want to start!

When time is passing and you’re trying to work out your new approach, consider this next commandment:

Try looking at time in a different way. In certain aspects of my personal and professional life, I am rewarded for multi-tasking, thinking ahead, efficiency. Toddlers aren’t interested in that. And when I am going crazy checking the time, wondering why we can’t just walk down the street at a brisk pace, and have to, I don’t know, watch my child stop and smell the flowers, I try to remind myself what an exceptional pleasure it is to be with a kid who says funny things and takes his time and forces me to breathe fresh air. Let’s not rush this moment; I’ll be stuck behind a desk soon enough. Also, when we get home, chances are excellent that we will be struggling to find stuff to do. Why not just stay out a bit longer?

Oh, consistency is your friend. Like dogs, people like consistency. Knowing what to expect makes us happy and secure. So when you make a routine or a rule, enforce it regularly, even when it’s not convenient for you or for your kid. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t breaks in routine.

Breaks in routine are also your friend. I like to think about life as being made up of regular days, and holidays. We worry about the nap schedule most of the time. On what I think of as a holiday, ie, an unnormal day when you are traveling or visiting someone or are doing a very special outing or you know that there is simply no chance that the child will nap, I try not to worry about the break in routine. It’s like ice cream on a diet, or a skyscraper bending in the wind. We need to be a little flexible in order to be successful.

Convenience is next to godliness. Or: keep it simple, superstar! It might not be your favorite scenario to have your kid eat Pirate Booty that isn’t, er, artisanally crafted by local pirates, but it sure is convenient. I’ve also noted that it is harder for a child to scream when its mouth is full of a foamy cheese snack.

Choice is another friend who starts with C. It’s best to avoid creating a monster who will only eat out of one particular bowl, even if it is in the dishwasher, even if you are on vacation and the dishwasher and bowl are in another state. Praising flexibility and not caving in to the whims of a hungry demon therefore make sense.

However, kids love to choose. Who can blame them? So where possible, let them choose their shoes, their snack, their shirt, whether they want peas or broccoli in the casserole, or what do do during the afternoon: this will give them a sense of agency. But remind them that sometimes you choose, too: it’s nice to sometimes listen to M. Ward in the car, instead of just the Sesame Street Singalong CD.

In the next installment, I am going to show how to apply the commandments to different situations.