The Toddler Strikes Again!!

Lucy, Julie’s mom, is at the back of the room and hasn’t made eye contact with you since you arrived. Funny. Last week you seemed to have so much in common. In fact, this week it feels as though everyone is keeping their distance a little bit. Sure, they are friendly enough but they aren’t initiating conversation and it feels as though you have to do more than usual to keep it flowing. You brush your worry aside reminding yourself that you all have toddlers and are tired and that you must just be extra sensitive today.

The toddler sign language class is over and the children are enjoying having some time together to play with toys and run around in an unstructured activity setting. Your baby, Mikal, grabs the red pin from the plastic bowling set and bangs it on his head. He laughs as he hears the sound it makes and as he realises it isn’t hurting him. He tries hitting the side of the plastic playhouse and giggles with glee as it vibrates up his arm and makes a louder, deeper sound. He is on a roll and you are enjoying laughing at his entertaining antics.

Then the environment changes completely. You’d turned to answer a direct question and as you turn back towards Mikal you are just in time to see the red pin come crashing down on the head of, Ryan, the toddler closest to your son. As Ryan begins to scream at the top of his lungs you lunge toward Mikal. He dissolves into tears at the same time. You pull him in close and remind him that it wasn’t nice to hit Ryan. You hope he understands what you mean. You snuggle and dance and smother his face with kisses and, once Mikal has calmed down and is quiet again you dutifully send him over to tell Ryan that he is “sorry.” You totally ignore the voice in the back of your head that reminds you toddlers have no concept of what they are saying when they apologise for misdeeds and misdoings.

Once the matter has been settled according to the pattern we parents deem appropriate you set Mikal off to play with something else; something less dangerous, you hope. You smile to yourself as he grabs a baby doll from the mini bassinette and snuggles it in close. He wraps both of his fat little arms around the doll and, as he walks around the small play area he buries his face in its neck to smother it with kisses. His eyes are closed and you realise, as it is too late to react, that he is in the process of tripping over the little girl, Anna, who was sitting on the floor playing quietly with the train set.

Mayhem erupts again. Anna starts screaming because the quiet peace of her individual play has been disrupted. She isn’t hurt but she is frightened and in her fear she lashes out with the piece of track in her hand, striking Mikal in the leg. We’ve forgotten that his quiet peace was also disturbed when he fell and so Anna’s reaction causes a reaction in him and he leans forward and bites Anna on the forearm.

Ugh. Biting: the worst fear of any parent. We don’t want our child to be bitten and we certainly don’t want our babies to be the biters either. Despite the flat reassurances from Anna’s mother you know she is upset. You can see in her eyes that she feels you should be reprimanding Mikal for his actions. What can you do though? How do you remedy this situation when Mikal is only 16 months old? You know he wasn’t TRYING to attack Anna.

You quietly resolve that the best solution is simply to go home. You gather your belongings as fast as you can and throw an hysterical toddler under one arm as you wrestle to get your poorly re-stuffed diaper bag onto your shoulder. You hear a shoe hit the floor and momentarily consider leaving it lying there because now that you have decided to go home, you can’t get out of there fast enough. A quick glance back over your shoulder reassures you that you have made the right decision. You have seen the looks pass between Anna’s mom, Ryan’s mom and Lucy, which suggest they aren’t sad to see the back side of you.

You get Mikal buckled into his seat and realise you need to take a few calming breaths before driving anywhere. Mikal remains crying and upset and you don’t want him to see you breaking down at the same time. You wipe the stress lines from your face and turn to look at him with a big, bright smile. He looks at you with pleading in his eyes and you know, beyond a doubt, that there is something big that he wishes he could tell you.

Why do some children act seemingly more aggressively than others? Are they here to indicate that we have ADHD children in the making, even from toddlerhood? Perhaps, but not likely. Our children are simply smaller versions of big people. Some teens and adults are far more physical and aggressive than others. Some people need to crank the tunes and move around to work through stressors while others need quiet and serenity with little to no movement to resolve conflict.

What are some of the most common aggravators of toddlers and young children?
• Physical limitations (i.e.: not being able to make the body do what they want it to do – climb stairs, run without falling, put a car on the back of a truck, get their shoes on by themselves, etc.)
• Poor verbal skills (i.e.: not able to create the sentence structure required to get a point across in a way that it is understood)
• Physiologic changes (teething pain, growing pains, learning to understand the need to toilet without soiling or wetting the diaper/training pants, etc.)
• Difficulty with change and transition to change (leaving an environment without warning that the change is coming or knowing it is coming but not wanting the current fun to end due to a lack of understanding that similar fun will happen again in the future)
**It may be helpful to note that many of these aggravators are made that much worse by the sleep deprivation and sleep disruption experienced by both the child AND the parent when there is physical pain and/or discomfort associated with the aggravators.**

Anna may have hit Mikal with the track because she didn’t have the verbal skills to let him know that she wished he hadn’t tripped over her. Ryan’s reaction was expected because he wasn’t anticipating being hit in the head, even though we saw Mikal hit himself in the head without it causing him to lose his smile. Mikal reacted to the reactions of the other children, exactly as we would have done as adults in similar situations. We might not have bit Anna but we may very well have lashed out at her.

Mikal can’t tell his mother that he wishes he hadn’t tripped over Anna or that he didn’t mean to hurt Ryan any more than he can tell his mom that he wasn’t ready to leave the play centre just yet and that that is why he is still crying when he is put in the car.

Perhaps Mikal’s reaction to being hit by Anna was to bite, in part, due to the fact that he is working on getting new teeth, his gums hurt and his patience is a little short because he didn’t sleep as much last night as he usually does. As parents we don’t often look at the reasons for the actions we just look at the actions by themselves.

So many of the parenting “experts” will tell you how to deal with the behaviours you don’t like. Very few of them spend time outlining the potential motivations behind the behaviours.

Would you really believe that the best response to a child yelling and throwing a car across the room is to take the car away (because if they really wanted it, they wouldn’t have thrown it) if you spent some time watching your child and began to understand that she was reacting to the fact that she couldn’t get the car to sit at the top of the ramp without moving until she was ready to launch it? Are there not considerably better ways to react to that kind of a situation than that? Like, for instance, sitting and playing cars with her and trying to help her achieve her goal?

What about biting your child because they bit you, or bit someone else? What on earth does that teach them, other than the fact that you can bite? Wouldn’t they be better served by having you slice some cold apple for them to chew on or give them a frozen facecloth to work over their, obviously, sore gums?

When you decide to react to the behaviours in your child that you don’t like remember that YOU know your baby better than anyone else. Look at him or her and spend some time determining what factor is behind the way they are acting and what you can do to turn the situation around without having to give either one of you a, useless, “time out.”

Posted by Sam