Your Two-year-old

A dated, but informative (and informed) look at the developmental stages. This is a short, inadvertently funny and overall reassuring read about the “terrible 2s”.

Some scattered thoughts.

- This was an interesting counterpoint to another academia-to-pop child dev book, The Emotional Life of the Toddler. This book was written by some folks from a Yale child dev lab; it was informed (as I presume Emotional Life was informed) by a lot of qualitative evidence and observation of toddlers doing their toddler lives. However, the two books diverge in the underlying theory (caveat: I have no academic training in child dev, I just find it interesting! so I might be missing the mark here, or mixing up jargon): whereas Emotional Life took a psychoanalytical (even Freudian!) approach to the toddler mind, this book takes a much more behaviorist approach. The basic thesis (and this might rub you, dear reader, the wrong way!) is that humans are basically robots in their development, and pass through a very clearly defined set of stages, mostly around more-or-less the same age. i.e. 2 year olds are fine, 2.5 year olds are hurricanes. So, DEEP IN THIS BOOK, the basic argument is the traditionalist “puppy training” argument of toddler management.

- There is a short tips and techniques for management section which is worth this book's weight in gold. For example, they have a bullet-pointed list of “Face saving techniques” which, OH BOY, could I have used over the last few months/weeks/days/hours. You basically have to assume you are dealing with a tiny contrarian full of whim and short-lived desires, and you have to psychologically jiu jitsu your way through the day. I already knew some of these, just implicitly/in my heart, e.g. NEVER EVER ask a yes/no question because the answer is NO. e.g. “Do you want to take a bath? Do you want to leave the playground?” But there was some nice reassurances as well: e.g. kids aren't really social so much as territorial and ego-centric - they are mostly worried about their possessions. This isn't cuz they're mean or unsocialized - they just growin' up, man!

- The book is definitely dated, it is basically specifically addressed to Mother, specifically the Stay At Home Mother of the 1970s. Indeed, I hope it was a balm to many SAHMs of yore! The authors' bottom line is: OUTSOURCE OUTSOURCE OUTSOURCE childcare as much as you can at this stage. I think this is TRUE, dudes! My general interested reader skimming of cultural anthro around child development is that this whole mom-attached-to-child thing is NOT some sort of cosmic, universal “Nature” truth, but rather is something that varies a lot by culture. And toddlers are tiring. Outsooooource. There are other forehead-slapping moments of “wow, 1970s!” such as: “for the hyperactive child: tranquilizers!” and “maybe consider putting them in the backseat instead of the front”. Ha!