In Order to Defeat a Toddler, You Must Think Like a Toddler
The answer is probably yes, but he’s also a toddler, and they’re all more or less like this. What I’ve learned in my relatively short time as a toddler dad (and no one gets that many reps at it, unless you’re some kind of insane pro-natalist or Alec Baldwin) is to do my best to embrace it. When my son tries to retrain me like an ornery pig, what this parenting take presupposes is: Maybe let him?
Yes, it’s my job as a father to do my best to produce a caring, well-adjusted, valued member of society who is not a drag, danger, or constant source of annoyance to those around him. All that is true, and yet easily the best part of fatherhood has been the way it has naturally reconfigured my priorities. Every day I get to vicariously experience anew hundreds of things that I’ve long taken for granted. Parenthood is a lot like microdosing, if you let it be. Sure, getting to a dinner reservation on time is important, but so is seeing a snail inch its way across the sidewalk. They have their eyeballs on the end of slimy little tentacles! How wild is that?
Adult priorities are not kid priorities, and that’s the central difficulty in parenting a toddler. You want them to put on shoes or eat food or go to bed, when they’re more interested in finding a toy or eating Fruity Pebbles off the floor or doing absolutely anything besides going to sleep. We adults tend to live in a world of rigidly regimented schedules. We allot limited blocks of time to certain activities, often without being conscious of it. This should take this much time, that should take this much time, and then I’ll be perfectly optimized to eat, sleep, work, shit, and die, having foreclosed most opportunities for epiphanies or experimentation. Toddlers, obviously, do not live in this world. They live in a world where everything is new and cool and you can enjoy a color so much that you only want a yogurt that color, even if you don’t know where yogurt comes from or what it is or how much it costs, or that the new yogurt tastes exactly the same as the old one why can’t you just try it first!!!
I’m doing my best to let my son retrain me about which things are really important at the same time as I’m (mostly impotently) attempting to shoehorn his whims into today’s prefab slots. That doesn’t mean I’m advocating for some hippy-dippy style of parenting where I just let him run around naked eating food off the floor and trying to bash lizards with a hammer. It’s just an acknowledgement, a sort of internal mantra, that recognizing the limits of your own control are as important a part of parenting as the enforcement of them. I’m training him to become an independent entity, which means he frequently does things I can neither control nor sanction. I have to remind myself that it’s part of the deal. So that when I’m trying to get him to pay attention to his T-ball coach hitting him grounders (he’s a toddler—they’re very soft grounders) and he’s more interested in the goose feather that he found on the field, I can at least take a beat to acknowledge that, yes, it’s a cool feather and, in fact, feathers in general are pretty fuckin’ cool, before I get frustrated at him for not doing what he’s “supposed” to do. Life can’t wait forever, but it can usually wait a little.
A lot of times the schedules we’ve created for ourselves aren’t actually as rigid as we’ve made them out to be. They’re built on internal assumptions that sometimes we haven’t even taken the time to acknowledge, let alone question. Many of the invisible contracts that order our lives aren’t so ironclad. They’re much more negotiable than we allow them to be. And parenthood is as important for teaching us that as it is for us to teach a tiny human how to wipe his ass.
