How To Survive The Terrible Twos

By: Karen Dennis, owner of The Next Best Thing To Mummy

Most of the tantrums that a 2 year old has can be dealt with quite simply:

Basically don’t give in to bad behaviour. Unwanted behaviour is often a form of attention seeking, ignore unwanted behaviour wherever possible and reward the good, wanted behaviour. A reward can be as simple as verbal praise, don’t get into the habit of giving gifts as a reward for good behaviour; children will soon use this as a way of getting more expensive presents, which will result in behaving well for the wrong reason.

I remember being at a toddler group when working as a registered child minder: I had an 8 month old baby on my lap and two older children were playing on the floor in front of me, the 2 year old boy started to misbehave as a way of getting attention, he also wanted me to put the baby down.

I managed to distract him for a moment by pointing to something out of the window, he then tried to push the baby off of my lap. A parent at the group made a comment about the boy’s behaviour, I politely explained that it was typical behaviour for a child of his age.

To keep everyone happy I managed to keep the baby on one knee and let the 2 year old sit on my other one.

Temper tantrums in a 2 year old are sometimes because they don’t have the communication skills to explain what they want and get frustrated when an adult doesn’t understand.

I looked after a girl who didn’t have this problem; she was an advanced talker for her age of rising 3, in fact she would tell me when she was going to be naughty!

I dealt with this by giving her verbal encouragement for the smallest sign of any good behaviour and then upped the anti by giving stickers as a reward . It didn’t take long for her to learn that being good got her positive results.