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Home › Articles › Discipline › Revenge of the Toddler

Revenge of the Toddler

Empowering Your Spirited Child

By Laura Cone

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The keys, she says, are using differential attention, being consistent and being a parent, not a friend, to your child. "She has never done anything like hit me or revengeful things," Dean says. "I think she knows she can't cross that line. She has gotten mad and thrown a tantrum when we take something away. We don't focus on the negative attention."

Giving Choices
Lynn Hartle, a professor of early childhood education and development at the University of Central Florida, says it is important to empower a toddler with choices. However, a toddler cannot typically handle more than two or three. "You can't give 15 choices," says Hartle. "You can't give them open-ended questions they have to think through. They don't have the experiential knowledge base to draw from.

There are times children should be told "no," says Hartle, who is also a mother of one and taught preschoolers for 10 years as a Montessori teacher. "It may sound harsh," she says. "If something is going to come in to their harm or it's not appropriate behavior or can cause other people harm, they can't do it."

Finally, Hartle says parents who assume their toddler has an agenda need to develop a tolerance level for their toddler's "accidents" and purposeful messes. "Toddlers will drop their plates from high chair to floor just for the fun of it," she says. "Sometimes they are playing, believe it or not. They learn through actions and interactions."

She agrees it's important to use differential attention. In other words, give a toddler attention when he is behaving, not misbehaving. "A child that young can't really have an agenda," Hartle says. "Reality is he is trying to figure out about the world and where he stands. If the child is doing something aggravating to get attention, if the parent walks away, the behavior extinguishes. Oftentimes we, as adults, think these tiny people have premeditated agendas, but they may not. It can be a form of play and understanding their world."

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