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July 10, 2021 - February 2, 2022
This preschooler age range is wildly misunderstood. It’s such a crazy time of growth and brain development. But the most important aspect of this age range is individuation. Individuation is the psychological process in which your child individuates, or separates from you to become an individual. Prior to these years, your child really believes that you and he are one and the same person.
Then begins this process of individuation, when they start to realize Oh, hey! Look at this! I’m MY OWN PERSON. And that brings the age of no. And all the attitude. And all the personality. And all the opinions. And ta-da! You got yourself a threenager.
teenagers and toddlers are both awesome. Both experience explosive growth, coupled with a developmental need to push against and away from you, and in this way they’re very similar.
Zero to six years is governing. Six to twelve years is gardening. Twelve to eighteen years is guiding.
See, the big problem is that toddler brains aren’t ready to be guided. Their development is not ready for endless choices and good decision-making. They have low impulse control, low empathy, and almost zero long-term judgment. They need governing: rules and boundaries with real-life natural consequences. I find that’s where a lot of parents get murky.
I also believe that we as parents have been on the planet a lot longer. We are the ones in control because we know more.
You are going to see erratic behavior because their brains and physical bodies are exploding with growth. However, if that erratic behavior becomes the norm, that’s when we as parents start drowning—and may blame it on the child.
I’m talking about soulful connection with our kids. I’m talking about examining ourselves to find our triggers, to find our unconscious contributions to toddler behavior. So, let’s start with you, the parent. Here’s the deal: sometimes we get so mired in our kids’ behavior we forget that we are the ones in charge. Which means we are contributing to the dynamic and thus the behavior. Yes. With the explosive brain development of this age, it’s absolutely certain that some of your child’s wonky behavior comes out of the blue. However, we have to look at ourselves. How we are running the
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In other words, we all bring some shit to our parenting table that we think has nothing to do with the actual child or situation that is right in front of us, but surprise, it is part of the bigger picture.
Boundaries are truly the base of parenting. If you have any notion of good parenting or bad parenting, it’s probably based in boundaries. In simple terms, these are the rules and expectations you have.
Kids are always learning. Always. It doesn’t matter if we are actively teaching. They are always observing, picking up cues and nonverbal communication. They are learning the rules of living in your family. They are learning the rules of living, period. They are literally learning their place in the world. They are naturally going to fight to be alpha dog. They are naturally going push boundaries and then push some more. And they are super curious where the limits lie. Here’s the part that often gets lost in the shuffle of crappy behavior: This is their developmental job.
Since pushing boundaries is her job right now, your child can’t be faulted for exploring her limits. The whole world is so new and exciting. She has to figure out her place in it. And that means testing the limits. Every limit. Every time. Everywhere. It’s then up to us to set the boundary. Boundaries are the key to life.
Boundaries are your lines in the sand that cannot be crossed without consequences. They are your rules, both personal and parental. They are your no and your yes. What you’ll put up with, what you won’t.
You are going to set a rule or a “no” in place, and here’s what trips most parents up: the expectation that your little one will be cool with it. I’m telling you right now, it is his job to not be cool with it. It is his job to push against it. I’ll say that again (and again): It’s a toddler’s developmental job to push against your “no.” Which means your job is to hold firm.
Then holy shit. Somewhere around thirty months, this crazy thing called individuation starts to happen. Children begin to realize they are different from you. Which means they can say no. Which means the quest for alpha dog status has begun. On your mark, get set, limit testing!
At two, they have not hit individuation. They care about what you think, they care about pleasing you. Boundaries are fluid and don’t have to be stringent. Then three hits and you think you still have the same sweet child who cares about what you think. But because of individuation, your little one doesn’t give a rat’s ass about what you think. So now those boundaries need to be strong! What gets tricky is that in many ways toddlers seem to be practically the same child at two and three, but psychologically, they are worlds apart.
Your average dog and your average three-year-old are at the same level of brain development. Literally. Of course, dogs will stay there and our children will very quickly mature and develop more brain power. But it’s a good marker when we try to reason with three-year-olds—meaning, of course, you can’t. Reason hasn’t entered the developmental picture yet.
It is up to me to be the alpha. I physically and mentally have to be in charge. All my nonverbal communication, everything about how I move and act, has to say, “I got this. I have you under my wing. You don’t need to control anything right now.”
If we don’t “govern” in those zero to six years, the child will simply, in a primal instinct way, say, Okay. If you aren’t going to be the alpha, I will.
I often say behavior that looks “bad” is often curious behavior. Figuring out the world around them demands manipulation, demands mistakes, demands seeking control. It invites a literal, Who’s in control here?
The problem is they don’t yet have the brain power to handle that job. They don’t have a large amount of impulse control. They don’t have the extended thought process or long-term judgment to handle this job. Like a dog, they’ll run right out of your front door and into traffic because Squirrel!!!
We simply must be the ones in charge. I often compare boundaries to a fence: a mental, emotional fence. We put fences up in our yard, yes—to keep things out but also to keep our children in. We don’t let toddlers out the front door and expect them to make well-informed, sound decisions.
why does this happen so naturally in a situation like a parking lot? Because we have to keep our children safe. Plain and simple. Physical boundaries tend to be easy because the danger is so obvious. In the parking lot there is a right way and a wrong way to behave. You as the grown-up know the right way, and you impose strong boundaries. This isn’t a place to experiment. The margin of error is simply too narrow to mess around with. Emotional boundaries tend to be trickier, but the essence is the same. Parenting at its core is about keeping our children safe and alive and thriving. Boundaries
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An underslept toddler (a rampant occurrence these days) doesn’t stand a chance at being her best self.
All kids, but especially kids in the toddler/preschool age range, need slow transitions. They just don’t react quickly: they need to move slowly from thing to thing.
Toddlers are often jokingly called tiny dictators by their parents. I have literally heard the terms dictator, tyrant, terrorist, and holding hostage in conjunction with toddlers. Those are some pretty strong words for a little one who probably weighs in the thirty-pound range, does not in fact command an army, and has no complicated war strategy.
If boundaries are important to everyone, I’m willing to say that boundaries are paramount to good parenting. Setting and keeping them is about the most important aspect of parenting. Because good boundaries in parenting make our children feel safe.
If we look at boundaries like a mental or emotional fence, just like a physical fence, they keep our children safely within those parameters. If we keep moving the fence, the child is on constantly shifting mental ground. If one day a certain behavior gets a soft talking-to, and the next day the same behavior makes Mom lose it, that is very psychologically unsafe for the child. You as a parent become an unpredictable powder keg.
My question to families I work with is this: Are you being effective? Because if you’re not, find another way.
Boundaries are emotional swaddling as your child grows.
If the child gets to hang on to the power wand, things start to get wonky.
Given too much power, your child won’t actually feel safe. She will push and push for that safety. What’s so confusing is that that push often looks like bad behavior. If the child could clearly articulate this, it would be something along the lines of “I don’t feel comfortable here so I’m going to act out until you tell me where I can stop.” Often, escalating behavior that pushes boundaries is your child asking for a limit. “How far can I go? Please tell me.”
We think being firm is limiting the spirit of the child, when really, having limits allows your little one to feel safe and let that spirit blossom. Your child’s psyche can’t grow if he is constantly working out where his limits are.
When we have clear rules and boundaries, when we can say no with our parental authority and the child knows we mean it, that child can do a child’s job, which is to play and discover.
A no should be a no that no amount of crying or fit throwing will make you cave on. A yes is yes. There can always be a yes, as long as you are in control of the situation. Because if you’re not, then your child is.
Boundaries are knowing when to say yes and when to say no. It’s clearly communicating your limits, your capabilities, and when you’ve had enough.
By governing and being more of an authoritative parent now, you get to spend the later years cultivating those seeds you sowed and truly have a blast “gardening” with your child.
If you have ever spent or are currently spending time with your average three-year-old, you probably don’t need any brain science to know that, yes indeed, our little guys have undeveloped frontal lobes and aren’t equipped to make any kind of if/then decisions.
Impulse control is just starting to develop around age four. I repeat: just starting.
If we only try to reactively guide our children and don’t give them our rules, boundaries, and expectations, then they don’t know how to play this game of life. Imagine someone sitting you down to play a board game. There are no rules to start with, so you randomly move your piece. The other player gets mad. “That’s not how you play!” You sit there totally befuddled and say, “What are the rules here?” The other player says, “You can figure it out. Explore. Have fun. I don’t have to give you rules.” So you move again and get yelled at. Totally. Crazy. Making. Right?
Our kids operate best on a full emotional gas tank. You fill that tank through connection. The funny thing about filling that tank is that it usually doesn’t take long and it usually doesn’t take much. It just needs to be authentic and sincere. Our little ones are so freaking sensitive, they can totally pick up on whether we are being authentic or not.
The goal is to not drain your own battery so you avoid having to shut down to recharge.
Our kids can tell when we’re not really present, when we’re not really connected. They can feel it, and it makes them hungry beasts.
Whereas if you can be 100 percent present but for smaller chunks of time, and that fills your child’s emotional tank and buys you some “off ” time, that’s a brilliant investment.
What we all tend to do is try to be available all the time and we fail, because we have to, we’re human. Our kids end up getting crumbs of us and they hate that. So they act even needier.
Remember, kids don’t need a lot to fill their tanks. They need a bouillon cube of your attention; it needs to be concentrated.
Factoring in your tolerance for focus and how much time your child actually needs to get her tank full, I have found that twenty to thirty minutes is usually plenty in one sitting. That’s enough for the child, but it’s also when you will run out of steam for being super focused with what she is doing. That’s when the holy-shit-I-can’t-make-another-Play-Doh-snake starts to sneak in. Your to-do list starts to beckon. That’s when you call it quits. Anything after that point is going through the motions.
Yes, I know at times kids will be over-the-top silly just to get laughs. However, if you find that your child always seems to be doing crappy things for attention, she may, in fact, just need more of this connection type of attention.
Our kids really want to converse with us and be part of our conversation. It’s a part of why they interrupt us—to be included in all the talking. Unfortunately, because of the short amount of time they’ve been on the planet, they don’t have that much to contribute to a conversation. But they love to talk with you.
Twenty minutes of superengaged conversation, all ears, fosters the sense that you like your child.
