We’ve all, in our carefree youth, looked at bawling-give-t-to-me-or-I’ll-scream children and wondered why parents couldn’t control them. The kid screams, the mommy shusshes, the kid screams some more and the mommy loses patience and eventually, after a minor spectacle, the family leaves and people go back to eating in peace. We’ve all seen that.
Then one day we turn into that very mother who looks apologetically at everyone in the restaurant and prays that her child calms down. It’s difficult, at first, to find yoursef in that reversed place..
The truth is that when your terrible two year old wants to do something badly, there’s little you can do to prevent her or him. Yes you can do all the stuff baby sites write about – give alternatives, explain, cajole blah and blah and more blah..but there’s theory and then there’s reality! When my two year old wanted to tear down the aisle on a plane trip recently, there was damn all I could do to stop her..she was tired of being in one place and wanted to run up and down. Stopping her led to piercing screams..so it was either that or the running. I relented and chose the latter.
There’s no right or wrong, mostly, when you deal with your two year old..every situation is different, even if it looks same on paper. At first I wondered if I’d brought her up wrong, done something fundamentally different which is why she was behaving this way. You go through that, the guilt. But it passes and you realize that it’s a phase.
At least I hope it is.
mommyrage.com 