Our little one Miss A is a toddler now. I can hardly believe she is turning 2 soon. We are going through that phase where she says no to everything and tantrums about everything that doesn’t go her way.
I remember this phase well with the other two as well. And I remember other Mom friends and how they handled certain situations.
I read in a book, although I can’t remember which, that picking up your child every time they hurt themselves, cry or just tantrum about something trivial like you took the water bottle from where it was to put it somewhere else, will just make them have a sense of power and quickly learn how to use that power and become a master manipulator. It also makes you their comfort blanket.
I’m sure that if you are such a parent (and I’m not judging) you know when you are being manipulated. I think we all know when a cry is genuine and when a cry is fake. The problem is that, more often than not, we have to do something about it right away. If you’re in the middle of the supermarket and your child starts screaming from the top of her lungs, you can’t just not do nothing, because people will think you’re a bad Mom. Or can you?
So what did I do? Well, when Miss Z was starting to walk and bump into just about anything and then cry, or have tantrums about anything, I would go down to her level (the floor) and I held her and patted her on the bum with words of comfort. But I didn’t pick her up. Even if I wanted to pick her up at the time, it would have been a challenge because I was heavily pregnant with Mr A.
If she fell or something dropped and the crying started but you could see it was a “look at me, something’s happened” cry, I would tell her to get up in a perky voice and to shake it off by clapping hands together.
This instinctual reaction we have of just picking them up and “rescue” them is, in my opinion, counterproductive because it leads to a feeling of dependency on the child. In addition to the feeling of power over Mommy, they will start feeling like they need that comfort, in order to feel better. And that is not the path I wanted for my kids; I wanted them to get up and go. I wanted them to understand that crying is an emotional reaction to real pain, not a replacement for communication.
We know that in school, teachers aren’t going to pick them up and comfort them. They may not even hug them. And that is one reason why for so many kids, when they start Nursery, it’s a huge shock, and so they cry when you leave, because it’s like taking the comfort blanket away.
As time goes by and from the moment they started being able to communicate with words, I would hold them at their level, tell them to calm down, stop crying and to tell me in words what they were feeling. This is a challenge for parents and kids, but it’s so worth it later on…