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Get Your Toddler to Cooperate!
An Excerpt
By Elizabeth Pantley
Parent as Diaper: Lie right here next to me. Right here. Yup. Can I go on you? Oh yes?! Goody goody goody! (The diaper chats with David while he's being changed. Then it says, Oh, David! Listen, I hear your shoes calling you -- David! David!
The most amazing thing about this trick is that it works over and over and over and over. You'll keep thinking, "He's not honestly going to fall for this again?" But he will! Probably the nicest by-product of this method is that it gets you in a good mood and you have a little fun time with your child.
When you've got a toddler this technique is a pure lifesaver. When my son David was little I used this all the time. One day, when he was almost 3, we were waiting in a long line at the grocery store and I was making my hand talk to him. He was hugging my hand and looked up at me and said, "Mommy, I love for you to pretend this hand is talking."
Another day, after I had called David to the table for dinner a number of times, he calmly looked up at me, chubby hands on padded hips and said, "Mommy, why don't you have my dinner call to me?"
And suddenly, the peas on his plate came to life and called out to David; he ran over to join us at the dinner table.
A variation on this technique is to capitalize on a young child's vivid imagination as a way to thwart negative emotions. Pretend to find a trail of caterpillars on the way to the store, hop to the car like a bunny, or pretend a carrot gives you magic powers as you eat it.
It's delightful to see how a potentially negative situation can be turned into a fun experience by changing a child's focus to fantasy.