What to Expect the Toddler Years (5 page)

This wonderfully informative book is destined to win blue ribbons for authoritativeness, readability, and usefulness. One of the things that impressed me most as I read it was how thoroughly it prepares parents to understand the needs, behavior, and development of their toddlers, while offering hundreds of valuable suggestions on their care, guidance, and management. (Perhaps that last word should be in quotes. With toddlers, it’s never really clear who manages whom.)

But
What to Expect the Toddler Years
is more than a user-friendly technical handbook. The authors present the developmental essentials of the difficult but delightful toddler years in such an accessible and empathic manner that appreciative parents will undoubtedly recommend this book to their friends as a genuine household necessity.

It has become increasingly clear that a child’s first three years of life largely determine his or her future developmental trajectory. To a large extent, these early years set the stage for later outcomes in personal health, emotional development, educational attainment, social competence, self-confidence, self-reliance, and positive human relationships. Parental investment in the coin of nurturance, care, love, and understanding during this formative age period brings both short- and long-term dividends.

This latest addition to the What to Expect series helps parents to achieve these dividends in several ways. It helps parents know what to expect from their toddlers at various ages and stages, and reassuringly maps the wide range of normality. It guides parents in the always challenging, often daunting task of helping the toddler deal successfully with such key developmental issues as good nutrition, timely immunization, safe play, sound sleep, weaning, speech, separation, self-discipline, good health and hygiene habits, as well as various child-care situations.

Considerable attention is given to practical suggestions for the prevention of behavioral and developmental problems. But the authors not only help parents to avoid the negative, they strongly accentuate positive values with innumerable sidebars devoted to the care and nurturing of the toddler’s understanding of right, wrong, and the gray areas in between.

Temper tantrums? Breath-holding spells? Sleep disorders? Biting? Short attention span? Speech delay? Toileting worries? Autonomy? Negativity? Resistance to limits? Along with why such behavioral and developmental problems happen, detailed guidance is offered on ways to get them to stop—or at least to minimize them. These recommendations are developmentally based, in keeping with the child’s chronological age, needs, and abilities.

Parents themselves are not neglected. A principal goal of the book is to provide frequently overwhelmed and sometimes despairing parents with the kind of information that promotes confidence, self-esteem, resiliency, and feelings of effectiveness. Common parental questions (including those of parents working outside the home) are posed and comprehensively and reassuringly answered. Parent–toddler interaction and communication are strongly promoted as ways to give a young child and his or her parents a good start. Throughout the book, the toddler is
viewed in the context of his or her family, with an emphasis on identifying and augmenting the strengths of both.

The authors’ thoughtful advice and suggestions are intended to help readers enjoy their toddlers—to take a positive approach to the challenges of their formative years, to understand what often seem to be (but often aren’t) irrational behaviors and to put them in perspective, to accept and respect each child as a unique individual and contribute to the realization of that child’s potential.

This book directly responds to the sensible desire of today’s parents for information that fits our times, a period characterized by rapid changes in the family and our society. This highly skilled synthesis of childrearing principles, savvy from the social, behavioral, and biologic sciences, and successful medical practice is clearly unsurpassed among child-care guides. It is an outstanding volume—one that will be extremely useful to both parents and professionals.

Morris Green, M.D., F.A.A.P.
Perry W. Lesh Professor of Pediatrics
Indiana University Medical Center

INTRODUCTION
A Tale of “Two” Toddlers

It was the best of the times, it was the worst of times. It was Emma’s toddler years.

Shoes hurled across the room because they didn’t “feel good” on her feet. Crackers rejected because they had a corner broken. A swimsuit donned on a frigid January morning, a snowsuit donned on a scorching August afternoon. Sit-down strikes on grimy New York City sidewalks (when there was no bus in sight), lie-down strikes in front of the candy display at the supermarket (when sweets weren’t on the shopping list). Daily tantrums, nightly sleep problems; battles fought at the dinner table (“Don’t wanna eat that!”), at the closet (“Don’t wanna wear that!”), at the playground (“Don’t wanna go yet!”). Stubbornness that wouldn’t quit, a temper to rival a marine drill sergeant’s, ritualistic behavior that bordered on the obsessive–compulsive.

And then, there was that smile—a smile that, in one endearing flash of pearly baby whites, could turn a hardened parental heart into a helpless pool of sentimental slush. And those hugs—spontaneous outbursts of unaffected affection more delicious (and more addictive) than imported chocolate truffles. And that voice—cuter than a voice has a right to be, uttering achingly adorable mispronunciation after mispronunciation (“bia” for banana, “pe-um” for peanut butter, “ga-ga” for daddy). And those moments—those thousand-and-one enchanting moments, the ones that made me forget the tantrums and the negativity, that entertained me, charmed me, and made me feel blessed. The way she “nursed” her teddy bears while I nursed her baby brother. The way she poured “tea” for her dolls, and administered shots to sickly stuffed animals. The way she sang to herself while she swung on the swings, and babbled to herself while she flipped the pages of her picture books. The way she scoured the park for caterpillars and butterflies to catch and observe in her “bug house.” The way she moved, the way she cuddled, the way she laughed, the way she played, the way she slept.

If there has yet to be a more difficult time in the raising of Emma, there has also yet to be a more delightful one. Though I’ve thoroughly enjoyed every era of Emma (from newborn to preteen; I’ll get back to you on adolescence), the toddler years—more harrowing than any roller coaster ride, and yet, much more intoxicating; a series of ups and downs that at once confused, captivated, exasperated, and exhilarated—were among my favorite years.

Of course, that’s easy to say now—now that Emma has evolved from an irrational two-year-old to a reasonable (most of the time), responsible, and responsive eleven-year-old, now that I have nearly a decade of time-heals-all perspective between me and those shoe-hurlings (we never did find that sneaker). It was decidedly less easy to say, or to feel, when Emma was a toddler.

If only I’d understood then what experience has helped me to understand now. That, to paraphrase the popular (but unprintable) aphorism, toddler behavior happens. And it has to happen—as inevitably as those two front teeth, as surely as those first steps. It doesn’t happen because you’re bad parents, and it doesn’t happen because your toddler’s a bad child—it happens because it’s supposed to happen and because it needs to happen. Toddlers don’t do what they do to drive their parents to distraction (though that’s often the result); they do what they do to grow, to mature, to come to terms with coming of age.

So it is to those trying, terrific, irrepressible, irresistible, completely confounding creatures we call toddlers—and to the parents who struggle to understand them—that this book is dedicated. In hopes that it will help parents of toddlers appreciate the best of times, cope with the worst of times—enjoy all the times that are the toddler years.

Heidi Murkoff

Before You Begin
How to Use W
HAT TO
E
XPECT THE
T
ODDLER
Y
EARS

When it comes to parenting, there are few absolutes (one, of course, being that every child needs to be loved) and there is no one “right way” (with the exception of issues that affect a child’s safety and health). Use this book for suggestions, for insights, for explanations, for examples—but use it to supplement and support rather than supplant your own instincts. Let it inspire you, not inhibit you. Different parenting techniques work for different children (even for different children within the same family, and the same child under different circumstances); different parenting styles suit different parents and the same parent at different times of life. Let this book serve as a guide as you use your skills, talents, instincts, and knowledge of yourself and your child (no one knows you and your child as well as you do) to try to discover what works best in your family.

What Your Toddler May Be Doing Now

Every child is unique; each develops at his or her own pace. Because few children are perfectly average or typical, comparisons are not very useful. And though we may be concerned about the child who lags behind his or her peers, that child may later make great leaps forward, catching up or even surpassing them.

Nevertheless, most of us want to know how our own child is doing in relation to other children, at least once in a while. To help you determine where your toddler’s development fits within the wide range of normal, we’ve developed a monthly milestone scale of achievements for the second year, and a quarterly milestone scale for the third year, into which virtually all toddlers fall. These scales are based on the widely respected Denver II scale, with a few added items from the well-regarded ELM (Early Language Milestone) scale.

Here’s how they work: Each “What Your Toddler May Be Doing Now” milestone scale is divided into four categories. The first, “What your toddler
should
be able to do,” lists milestones that have been reached by 90% of toddlers by that age. The second, “What your toddler
will probably
be able to do,” represents milestones that have been reached by 75% of toddlers. The third, “What your toddler
may possibly
be able to do,” includes milestones that have been reached by 50% of children. And the fourth, “What your toddler may
even
be able to do,” includes milestones reached by 25%.

Most parents will find their toddlers achieving in several different categories
at any one time. Some may find that their offspring stay consistently in the same category; others may find their child’s overall development uneven—slow one month, vaulting ahead the next.

All of these developmental styles are perfectly normal until proven otherwise. Still, there are times when a doctor should be consulted. For example, when a child consistently fails to achieve what a child of his or her age “should be able to do,” or when a parent has a gut feeling that something isn’t right with a child’s development. Even then, though an evaluation may be a prudent step, it may turn out that no problem exists. Some children keep moving forward but simply have a slower than average developmental timetable.

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