What to Expect the Toddler Years (85 page)

Teaching “Don’t touch!”
Place one or two display items in a shared room in plain view, within easy reach of your toddler, and declare them off-limits. (Since you can’t expect complete compliance immediately, these items should be safe for your toddler to touch and nonbreakable.) Whenever your toddler approaches them, warn, “Don’t touch.” Explain that they aren’t toys and that he mustn’t play with them because they are special. If he nevertheless shows an interest in handling them (and he probably will), pick up a piece yourself and let him touch while you hold. If you forbid his touching an object entirely, you will make him that much more eager to get his hands on it. Tell him that any time that he wants to touch, he has to ask a grown-up for help.

Teaching a gentle touch.
Too often children are taught
not
to touch without ever learning
how
to touch. Training a toddler how to handle things that are delicate, whether inanimate (precious pottery, fragile knickknacks, books) or living (babies, pets, flowers), should start early. Here’s how:

Choose a safe spot. Sit together on a carpet or in the middle of a large bed or sofa, for example.

Choose a safe subject. Don’t start off with a prized piece of pre-Columbian pottery; instead select something that you could easily live without if you had to (that banana-shaped candy dish Aunt Edna gave you as an engagement gift, perhaps).

Schedule “touching” lessons wisely. Children learn best—and are also less likely to dash a delicate item to bits in a fit of pique—when they’re not cranky, hungry, tired, wound up, or more impatient or frustrated than usual.

Teach by example, first. Take the fragile object in your hands with exaggerated caution, as if it were a Ming vase, and repeat the same chosen catch phrases over and over: “Be gentle.” “See how I’m being gentle?” “See how I touch it gently?”

Then try some hands-on experience. Put the object down, and let your toddler experience a gentle touch firsthand, stroking him the same way you stroked the object and repeating, “See, gently.” Next, show your child how to touch you gently. Take his hand and guide it across your skin, instructing him, “Be gentle.” Then, with him in your arms or on your lap, hand over the object and direct him to touch it “gently.”

Keep the lessons brief. Always quit while you’re ahead—hopefully, before anything’s broken.

Repeat the lessons often. You needn’t schedule them daily, but they should be frequent enough so that your child doesn’t forget what he’s learned from lesson to lesson. Also take the opportunity to talk about gentle touching whenever it arises, when your toddler wants to touch a new baby, for example, or pet the neighbor’s dog, or when he wants to handle a pretty figurine at Grandma’s house or a flower in the garden. Remember that with toddlers, repetition brings results.

Heap praise on your pupil—during and after the lesson. Nothing prompts compliance in a toddler like positive reinforcement.

Trust you must. If you give a child your trust, he’s likely to work very hard to be worthy of it. (And it can also do wonders for his self-esteem.) This does not mean you should give him free run in a china shop to prove your trust, but that you probably shouldn’t jump 10 feet in the air every time he comes within range of Grandma’s coffee table.

Don’t take chances. No amount of gentle-touch training can guarantee that an “accident” won’t happen. So anything that you value—and particularly, anything irreplaceable—should be kept out of your toddler’s reach, even once you feel his training is complete.