The ‘Terrible Twos’: Tantrums, Toilet Training and Thumb-Sucking

Miss E. had her second birthday last week.

We celebrated by giving her cake for breakfast. That’s a responsible thing to do, right?

She had cake for breakfast…but there were berries on it, so that makes it better, right?

Of course, with that birthday, she has entered the “Terrible Twos”.

I don’t know if this is supposed to be an over-night change, or just a gradual thing that people begin to notice when their child is becoming more like a human, and less like a thing that gurgles and giggles.

Tantrums

We have noticed Miss E.’s attitude showing through for awhile, soon after her first birthday in fact. The behaviour described in the previous post had calmed for awhile, to some extent. But she’s remembered how to produce those tears at will, and, now that she’s a bit bigger and has more weight to through around, she is more determined to get what she wants.

In the week since her birthday, she’s had a few tantrums, or mini-meltdowns. But maybe that’s more due to the aforementioned cake, and the Easter candy, than anything else. Still, as she grows and develops her personality, there will be more tantrums, and it will be an interesting time to keep not give in just to calm her down.

But turning two isn’t all about being terrible. We’ve also seen some great development.

But even that comes with its own set of questions.

Toilet Training

We’ve started toilet-training. In truth, we’ve been doing this for awhile. From a very early age, if we knew she had to use the washroom, we would set her on the seat. This was more to get her used to the idea than anything else. We didn’t want to rush her or pressure her, but rather introduce the toilet. But over the last few weeks we’ve been trying to get her on the toilet more often.

We use cloth diapers, and one of the reported benefits is that children toilet-train easier or earlier. So far, that seems to be true. She is already, often waiting until she can sit on the toilet, instead of soiling a diaper. On most days, we’re down to one or two dirty diapers. And this past weekend, she actually woke up dry from a full night’s sleep.

As I said, we are trying to make sure we aren’t rushing her into it but rather following her lead. And she seems to like using the toilet. So much so that, after she is done she will leave the washroom and loudly announce what she just did. It, of course, might help that toilet time has also become extended story time.

The biggest difficulty has actually been convincing other people that she is, in fact, ready for this.

When we told the daycare we were trying, their initial comments were not, “Oh great” but rather, “Oh…that’s early.” or “Oh, but she’s so little yet.” But they are on board now as well. We know she probably won’t be fully toilet trained for awhile, but we’re happy with where things are.

And Thumb-Sucking

On the opposite side of the coin is the pressure other people seem to put on her to stop sucking her thumb. From daycare to random people on the street, people will tell her that she doesn’t need to suck her thumb, that she would look cuter without her thumb in her mouth (yes, really), that she should stop that, ask if they can have a suck (which is weird, even if it’s someone you know, and when Miss E. is all too willing to put her finger in other people’s mouths), or even pull her thumb out of her mouth.

We know thumb-sucking isn’t great for kids. It can spread diseases, and hurt oral-development and all sorts of other things, but from all I’ve read, thumb-sucking is a soothing mechanism, and one of the best ways to make a child to continue sucking their thumb is to tell them to stop, or make them stress out about it. So, we give her that.

Maybe we have things in the reverse order. Maybe we are pushing her on to the toilet too fast, while being too lenient about thumb-sucking.

But there’s progress on that front too. She doesn’t insist on sticking her finger in her belly button while sucking her thumb, so that’s a step ahead.

• Cloth Diapers
• day-care
• family
• green parenting
• parenting
• terrible twos
• thumb-sucking
• toilet training