Parenting: Terrible Twos
by Harald Breiding-Buss
If your oldest child is around two years of age or slightly over, chances are that the days are numbering up where you don’t think you can cope much longer. Your parenting philosophies are starting to crumble, in favour of more drastic approaches, and arguments with your partner are happening more frequently.
Consciously or subconsciously you may find ways to drag out the return journey from work and may feel secretly glad to have been offered to do overtime, which is easy to justify as your total household income has been recently reduced.
None of this may apply to you, but some of the most unhappy and distressed people I have seen in my life are parents of a child this age—usually the oldest, and more often than not a girl.
It’s a dangerous time for a relationship as you may both be trying to find solutions in different ways, and junior’s behaviour likely pushes some long-forgotten buttons in you as well. Most people will tell you that your child is merely ‘testing boundaries’, making you think about whether you’re consistent enough because the boundary testing doesn’t seem to abate no matter what you do.
If it is any comfort: the tantrums, the stubbornness the constant challenges are not only normal, they are also desirable for the development of the child and an indicator of their secure attachment to you as parents.
It is important to understand that this age is a major step in each human’s development, unlike any other; it is the beginning of self-awareness. Before this age a child will not be able to recognize himself in a mirror or on a picture (do not be fooled by their ability to give those images their own names, though) and will only very rarely, if ever, refer to themselves as ‘I’ or ‘me’ or use the word ‘you’. They have little idea that they have any similarity at all with another child their age, or indeed that they belong to the same species. It’s the way an animal sees itself—it just is, and the world around it is there entirely for it.
The revelation that we share this world with others like us, who have the same kind of emotions and are driven by the same kind of needs, doesn’t come overnight. It takes even longer to realise why your two year-old should have any consideration for your (or anyone else’s) emotions or needs. Sharing toys, for example, doesn’t make sense if, in your view, the other child is just another part of the world that was made for you.
In becoming self-aware a child is introduced to the complexities of human social life—the myriad of signals we convey not just through the words we use, but the nuances inherent in them, the inflections and our body language. And then there are our beliefs about what is and isn’t acceptable, some of which run so deep that we believe them to be ‘natural’ – but our child has not yet any idea about them. Up until now a child’s learning was a mix of imitation and cause-and-effect learning. Other people’s needs or emotions didn’t come into it; it was simply “If I Do This It Will Have This Result”.
It is a good idea to take a moment to ponder what it would be like to be dropped into a culture that is totally alien to us, where we could not read another person’s body language, understand but the simplest of words and sentences, and people behave unlike anything we know. This is the world of your one– to two-year old.
Go with that analogy a bit further to see how you would cope with the situation over a period of time. You would probably adapt , understand more and more of the signs of nuances, and adopt some of their behaviours. But it won’t always feel right, and it will be stressful to keep up, day after day, week after week. You will still want to do things that you know are disapproved of, but you can’t see anything wrong with it or it gives you pleasure. It may not be long, before you too, are ready to throw a tantrum.
The key to surviving this age as a parent is to understand that most tantrums, obstructiveness and what we would think of as outright naughtiness are borne out of frustration and the very basic human need to carve out a place for yourself in this world in which you are accepted as you are, not as others want you to be. And even though it so often seems like a one-way street, your continuous love and support, with the resulting attachment between you, is by far the most important ingredient in your child’s learning.
Sympathising with your child must not stop you from applying good guidance, however, even if that means that you are responsible for the odd frustration and tantrum of the child yourself. Here are some of the most important techniques:
Routines. Things that stay the same are enormously comforting in a world that is so hard to understand. Routines for bedtime, for getting up, for mealtimes, even for mummy or daddy to come home from work, all help tremendously to make life easier for all of you.
Do not let a tantrum change your mind. A tantruming child is more often than not genuinely unable to stop herself even if she wanted to, unless you remove the cause for the tantrum. The problem is, if you ‘give in’ to whatever it was your child wanted, she will come to expect this and will take much longer to grow out of tantrums. However, do not punish your child for having a tantrum even if they happen in a place embarrassing for you.
Go easy on rules, but have a few. Like routines, rules provide some stability whether they are liked or not, but both your child and you will have trouble remembering and much less enforcing them if there’s too many.
Choose about five rules (no throwing food, no poking the cat in the eye, etc) that you consistently enforce with the same sort of response every time it is breached, and keep them simple.
Keep in mind that, for example, ‘no climbing onto the coffee table’ does not automatically extend to ‘no climbing on any table’ for your child, and neither will your child automatically assume that rules from your place apply at other people’s houses as well.
But the more consistently you apply a few simple rules, the easier you will find it to define their boundaries for years to come and have them accepted without too much fuss.
