Christy

I’m curious if any other toddler parents try to wall off/remove screaming and tantruming. We do a lot of the scripts people talked about here like name their feeling, explain why simply, tell child the behavior we want and enforce a natural consequence if they don’t do it when we count down from 3. This works decently well with our almost-3-y/o. But of course sometimes she just wants to scream and melt down bc we did something awful like flush the toilet w/o letting her do it first, and it disrupts our family and our baby. So we tell her “it’s ok to scream, but I don’t want to hear it” and tell her to go to her room or outside. We also say “When you calm down, or if you need a hug or kiss to calm down, please come out.” I really want to teach our toddler that she is not the only person whose feelings matter. But tbh, whenever we do this in front of other millennial parents they kind of give us side-eye lol. I guess I’m looking for some validation or other perspectives on not letting your toddler be the boss of the family 🙂

SO not fun, but sounds like you are doing a good job holding that boundary!!

I really enjoyed a podcast from the Busy Toddler lady about “how to get your kids to play independently” and have adopted a lot of her suggestions to help guide our outdoor time. Her perspective is: Unstructured play is work for kids! And like work, it can be good for you, it can make you feel accomplished, but it’s not easy, and you have to practice at it. My 3 y/o is an indoor loving kid who always wants adults to play with her and resists going to the playground or for a walk. So it helps to build outdoor play into our schedule, to announce it ahead of time, to not negotiate, and to set a time limit on unstructured outdoor play vs playing with a parent.

I would like the ability to comment on articles!