The parenting journey: Your two-year-old adolescent

First adolescence: A fearful timid adult, a rebel, or a balanced person! 

The “first adolescence”, which is a stage of disequilibrium, goes from approximately second to third birthday. It’s called that way because your little one will be acting exactly like a teenager. During this transitional phase between babyhood and childhood, your youngster will be trying to break up the patterns of equilibrium he has achieved as a toddler in order to attain the maturity of a child.

Therefore, this stage will involve lot of negativism and rebellion, and might be particularly difficult to handle. However, it is a positive stage in your child’s development, and it will save you so much trouble to know how to fruitfully deal with it!

What to expect?

The spanking curve will surely come to a peak at this age:

Ø The child tends to be rigid and inflexible; a perfectionist who can’t tolerate any alteration in his familiar daily routines, but he will still change his mind abruptly and violently when you least expect it.

Ø He is domineering and demanding, and loves to give orders. He can furiously resist help on something he obviously cannot do, and then burst into tears and accuse you for not helping him.

Ø He experiences violent emotions and frequent changes in mood. Often, it is difficult for the child to make a simple clear cut choice; he will shuttle back and forth between his contrary feelings: “I want it” to “I don’t want it”…

The bright side: this stage is marked with the charming enthusiasm, naivete, energy, and generosity of the two-year-old J 

Your child’s psychology:

This stage of development is the first one in which your youngster acquires a real sense of his unique self-hood; his individual sense of identity. Your child just realized that life is not one-way but two-way street. Hence, he is struggling with massive contradictory tendencies: “Do I want to do what my parents tell me to do, or do I want to do what I want, which is just the opposite?”

During this milestone, your child will be swinging back and forth between his wish to be independent (a child) and his desire to be dependent on you (a baby). It’s a transitional phase when he’ll try to figure out how to conciliate between his sense of self-hood (who he is) and what society (his parent at this stage) expects of him. That’s why rules and limits should be flexible for first adolescence, absolute and rigid rules are for children, and your youngster’s transition hasn’t fully completed yet! Not before his third birthday.

What can go wrong during this stage?

1.     An over-controlled child: the parents are strict and train their child to be passive and quiet. He will either grow up to be terribly shy and fearful, or hostile and narrow-minded (he does what’s expected of him, but inside, he is full of hatred and malice).

2.     An uncontrolled child: Parents are afraid to exercise control; the child ALWAYS has his own way. He will grow up to be rebellious incapable of conforming to rules.

A two-year-old DOES require reasonable discipline, but between being too strict or too permissive, how to insure a successful balance?

Child discipline

1.     Actions should be reasonably controlled:

             A child can learn how to control his actions; he cannot learn to control his feelings. For example, it is unreasonable to expect a child to control his feeling of anger, however; he should learn to control the action which articulates his outrage (like hitting, biting, throwing stuff…)

In general, it doesn’t matter what limits you set on your child’s actions as long as these limits are reasonable and consistent, and you can justify these limits to yourself and your child. Just don’t complicate your life and his with a bunch of truly unimportant “No-No’s”

2.     Feelings should be freely expressed

  When a child screams “You ugly, I hate you”, we usually scold him and say “No, you don’t say that, you say I love you!” and that’s WRONG.

We parents generally don’t allow a child to express his negative feelings. Instead, we try to talk him out of them. However, it is only when a child expresses his anger, fear, hostility… and get them out of his system that love, bravery, affection… can come in to take their place.

Teaching him to repress his bad feelings is negating his growing self-identity and sense of self-esteem.

3.     How to handle negative feelings?

Here is a little psychology lesson: paradoxically, the more you try to reassure someone who doesn’t feel good and talk him out of his feelings ("Don’t be sad, everything’s going to be fine!") the more the bad feelings will persist. On the other hand, if you feed him back his negative feelings and give him reason why he should feel such way ("You are right to feel sad, after all it hasn’t been easy!") the faster he’ll get over it. It’s called the feedback technique.

Show that you truly understand how your child feels by putting his feelings into your own words and reflecting them back to him, like a mirror.

Examples:

·        Child screams: “You ugly, I hate you”. The right reply: “You’re mad at her because she hit you, I understand!”

·        Child cries: “Mom, there is a monster in my room”. The right reply: “You are scared of that big monster.” “You are really afraid to go to your room.” “Tell me how you feel about that monster”…

·        Child complains: “I don’t want to go, I want to play more” The right behavior: you pick him up by force and he’ll probably start yelling and kicking, then you say “you are very mad at me for making you leave the park” “I know you were having fun but we must go now!”

It might be hard to put this technique into practice as we were raised to systematically reject and deny any negative feelings. And sometimes, it will sound offensive to let your child say out loud to you “I hate you!”. But let’s put it that way: Allowing your child to express his anger is like letting off the steam in a boiler, and feeding his rage back is like pouring cold water on the boiler.

Ps: If we are trying to give our children the right to express their feelings, we should certainly give ourselves that same right! So it’s totally OK to lose it sometimes, and yell at your kid. Let it all out and you’ll feel better ;) 

4.     How to handle temper tantrums?

Tantrums are the ultimate in negativism, your child will cry, scream, kick, and throw himself on the floor.

• Don’t give in to his tantrum and do what he wants, you’ll teach him to throw more tantrums in order to get his way.
• Don’t get angry at him because he’ll know that he can get to you anytime with it.
• Don’t try to reason with him, he is a boiling sea of emotions, he is in no mood to listen to logic.
• Don’t threaten him, it’s like pouring gasoline on fire
• Just ignore the temper tantrums, and they will diminish gradually!

The good outcome!

Virtually, all healthy kids will show some amount of disobedience and resistance at this age, but it is momentary. By the age of three, you’ll be amazed at how cooperative and calm he will become.

 Thence, the simple rule to overcome this challenging phase, and ensure a balanced mental health for your child, is to give him a chance to express his feelings, then feed them back to him, but stand firm, and insist on his obeying reasonable limits in his actions.