What to Expect the Toddler Years (94 page)

. . . may possibly be able to:

put on an article of clothing

. . . may even be able to:

identify 4 items in a picture by naming

use prepositions

“Every afternoon, when I get home from work, my toddler starts falling apart. She becomes hyper, cranky, and impossible to deal with. I dread this time of day.”

Whoever coined the phrase “Happy Hour” obviously never spent five o’clock with a toddler. This hour, and often the hour or so preceding and the hour or so that follows, is rarely a time for relaxing and unwinding. More typically, the mood is frantic and frazzled. At the end of a long day, toddlers are often overtired, oversensitive, and over-wrought, and even more prone than usual to fits of irrationality and negativity. Unfortunately, this hard-to-cope-with behavior happens when parental patience may be stretched to the snapping point—after an average day-in-the-hectic-life-of-a-toddler or after a tough day at work. It’s a time when even the coolest of heads are quick to overheat.

Nothing will guarantee peace, quiet, and intact nerves. But there are ways to take the frazzles out of five o’clock, most of which will work just as well for parents who have been home all day with their toddlers:

Unwind before you get home.
It’s not only the toddler who tends to be high strung at five. With dinner to be made, a toddler-taken-apart house to put back together, and if you’ve been at work all day, household chores, laundry, mail, and phone calls to attend to, the parental stress level can soar right off the meter. A parent’s five o’clock frenzy tends to fuel a toddler’s. So try to spend a few minutes unwinding before you pick up the kids or walk through the front door. Get off the bus or subway ten blocks from home and walk the rest of the way. Listen to soothing music on your CD or MP3 player or in your car. Stay in the driver’s seat for five minutes after you’ve pulled up to your driveway and practice deep-breathing relaxation techniques. And most of all, avoid putting your mind into overdrive with thoughts of what needs to be done; instead, think tranquil thoughts—they will help calm you before you tread into any potential chaos.

If you’ve been at home all day with your toddler, you’ll probably have to do your unwinding together (see the suggestions below).

Take a time-out together
. Instead of attacking your chores immediately, try to take a relaxing break (chances are that if you have a whining toddler pulling at your leg, nothing’s going to get done anyway). Take a few deep breaths, postpone dinner preparations, put the mail aside, and settle down for a special activity with your toddler—preferably away from the distraction of the work awaiting your attention. Cuddle up with her while you read some nursery rhymes or listen to some soothing children’s music (making it the same music each and every night will provide the comfort of consistency, and may even have a Pavlovian effect; you and your toddler will come to associate the music with calming down). Or get involved in an activity that you both enjoy (working on a puzzle, reading a story, looking at baby pictures, resting together in a dark and quiet room, taking a bath together in a tubful of warm water and bubbles, pounding on play clay, crayoning, playing with a toy that
requires adult supervision). Or, unwind with a family workout—take a walk to the playground, or a “jog” around the block, or stretch out on the family room rug for a yoga or aerobics session. If you have to get started on dinner, have your toddler help you.

Set a serene scene
. Take the phone off the hook (or let the answering machine pick up), dim any overly harsh lights, switch the television off, and remove any other agitating influences that might disturb the five o’clock peace—it’s tranquillity time. Encourage your toddler to play quietly and to avoid high-energy activities. For more relaxing occupations for toddlers, see page 173.

Feed the hungry
. A toddler’s tummy runs on a different timetable than that of an older child or adult; asking her to hold off her dinner hour until you’re ready to eat may be asking too much. And since hunger is a common generator of toddler grumpiness, feeding her early won’t just keep her
stomach
from growling—it can help keep
her
from growling, too. Other potential benefits of an earlier supper for your toddler: She’ll eat better (like the overtired child who can’t sleep, the overhungry child often can’t eat); you’ll eat better (sharing the dinner table with an irritable toddler can dampen anyone’s appetite); and you’ll be able to enjoy some quality time by yourself or with your spouse (particularly if you wait until your toddler’s in bed before sitting down to dinner, but even if you just wait until she’s calmer).

Fend off frustration
. During this tense time, try to keep your toddler away from activities that might frustrate her: games or puzzles that are beyond her skill, drawing or coloring (if she’s often disappointed by the results), block-building (if seeing her towers tumble upsets her).

“My son seems to reach for objects with his left hand. Should I encourage him to use his right hand instead?”

Hands off that child! Though the right hand is the right hand for a majority of the population, it’s the wrong one for the 5% to 10% destined to be lefties. There are a couple of good reasons why you should trust nature and time to reveal your child’s handedness.

First of all, persuasive evidence has shown that the hand a child favors is genetically determined. When both parents are lefties, there’s more than a 50% chance their children will also be left-handed. When just one parent is left-handed, the chance of a left-handed child drops to about 17%. When neither parent is left-handed, it’s down to 2%. Since it’s nature, not nurture, at work here, encouraging your toddler to use his right hand won’t help and could hurt.

Second, handedness isn’t usually apparent until at least the age of three, and some kids keep parents guessing for several years beyond that birthday. During these early years, it’s common for children to appear ambidextrous, freely switching back and forth between hands until they decide which is the more facile. About 20% of children never settle exclusively on one hand or the other, but remain to some degree ambidextrous. Some ambidextrous children use both hands equally well and can employ either for almost any task: others switch off for specific tasks—for example, using the right hand for eating, the left for throwing.

Third, research suggests that when parents try to “force” a child into using the hand he’s not genetically programmed to use, handwriting and other problems can result. Consider, after all, how tough it is for you to try to write
with the “wrong” hand just for fun; imagine how tough it would be if you were required to use that hand all the time.

Although there are no foolproof predictors of which hand a child will eventually favor, parents can sometimes see indications of future handedness even in young toddlers. Some clues (the hand a child uses to draw or throw a ball, for example) are better predictors of handedness than others (the hand he uses to hold a spoon). Some behaviors (which set of fingers a child chooses to scoop up finger food or to reach for toys) are so random that they rarely reveal a permanent preference.

Toddlers embrace the security that comes from the accumulation of possessions—the more possessions on their person at any given time (stuffed into bags, loaded into backpacks, crammed into pockets), the better.

In spite of the spurious “sinister” associations that have long been linked to left-handedness, favoring this hand over the right is nothing for either parent or child to be concerned about. Left-handed people, in fact, seem to fare better on average than righties in certain fields, particularly those that require a good sense of spatial relations—such as art, architecture, and athletics. The major negative: Lefties appear to have an increased susceptibility to accidental injury. This is probably due to the problems inherent in living in a world designed for right-handed people. If your child does turn out to be a lefty, stack the odds in his favor by providing him with lefty scissors and other implements, lefty mugs, and furniture and doors that open comfortably with the left hand. And take the safety recommendations in Chapter Twenty-One particularly seriously.

“My daughter likes to take bags and pack everything she can pick up into them. I’m forever unpacking these bags, and putting things back where they belong.”

“Mine” is an important word in the vocabulary of the typical toddler. It may be applied to objects that actually
are
hers as well as to those that are not. Busy trying to build her collection of belongings, this toddler often resembles a squirrel getting ready for winter. She may hoard or hide toys, clothing, books, half-eaten food, household items of an astonishing variety (from the merely mundane to the very valuable), not to mention keys, credit cards, shoes, ties, scarves, and jewelry belonging to other family members. Venture out of the house with the toddler, and little that she
can reach will escape her fingers—she’ll stash deposit slips and mortgage brochures she’s picked up at the bank, twigs and rocks she’s collected at the park, and, if you’re not careful, candy and gum at the supermarket.

This squirreling syndrome is normal and age-appropriate and in no way predicts a future of kleptomania or compulsive collecting. Acquiring, categorizing, and stockpiling possessions brings a sense of satisfaction and security to the toddler; building a collection can help build her ego, too.

So keep a tolerant attitude towards your little pack rat’s pursuits. Aid and abet her by providing her with a tote bag, child-size suitcase, or backpack bag for her collecting. And offer her a special drawer she can dump things into for long-term storage. To minimize battles, go through her bags and her drawer after she’s asleep to retrieve contraband. To reduce the need to constantly unpack, take steps to reduce the number of off-limits items available to her. Leave little
you
treasure lying around; have a hook near the door for your keys and handbag, put shoes in the closet, the hairbrush in a drawer, and so on. Lock away valuables at home and watch your toddler’s hands closely in stores (you might even want to check her pockets at the register as a matter of course; if you find she’s picked up some goodies, see page 444). And, when you find her expropriating an item that isn’t hers, gently remind her which items are all right to collect and which items aren’t; she will eventually get the message.