The phrase “terrible twos” has been around for a long time, but it doesn’t give toddlers, or their parents, a particularly fair deal. Around this age, children are becoming more independent, more curious and much more aware of what they want. Unfortunately, their ability to communicate those wants, cope with disappointment and manage big emotions has not quite caught up.
The result can be wonderful one minute and exhausting the next. A perfectly pleasant trip to the shops can collapse because a banana has broken. The wrong cup can become an emergency. Putting shoes on can suddenly become an issue of constitutional importance.
For parents and carers, it can be funny in retrospect and considerably less funny when you are tired, late and standing in the middle of it. Understanding what is happening developmentally can help, but so can recognising something parenting advice sometimes forgets: the adult in the room has needs too.
What is happening during the ‘terrible twos’?
Tantrums often become more common from around 18 months. Toddlers are becoming increasingly active and independent, but they are still learning how to understand, communicate and manage strong feelings. That combination can create a lot of frustration.
A toddler may know exactly what they want but not have the words to explain it. They may desperately want to do something themselves but not yet have the skills. They are also discovering that other people can say no, and that the world does not always rearrange itself around what they want at that particular moment.
From their point of view, this is quite a lot to deal with.
Big feelings with limited ways to express them
Adults have had years to develop ways of dealing with disappointment, anger, frustration and tiredness, and even then we don’t always manage particularly well. A two-year-old is only beginning to learn.
When emotions become overwhelming, toddlers can find it difficult to take in new information or respond to explanations. What looks from the outside like completely unreasonable behaviour may simply be a very young child who does not yet have another way to manage what they are feeling.
That doesn’t mean every behaviour has to be accepted. It does mean we can respond to the child without assuming they are deliberately trying to make life difficult.
Independence comes with frustration
Toddlers are discovering that they can make choices. They want to walk rather than be carried, choose what they wear, pour the drink themselves, open the door, press the button and put the shoe on.
This developing independence is important, but it also creates plenty of opportunities for things not to go according to plan. Allowing small choices where possible can sometimes help. “Red cup or blue cup?” is much easier for a toddler to manage than an entirely open question, while still giving them some control.
There will still be occasions when neither cup is acceptable. That’s toddlerhood.
Why toddler behaviour can be hard on parents
Knowing that tantrums are developmentally normal doesn’t make them easy to live with. Parenting a toddler can involve interrupted sleep, very little uninterrupted time, repeated demands for attention and the peculiar experience of spending a considerable amount of your day negotiating with somebody who may not yet understand why they can’t lick the supermarket floor.
There can also be pressure to respond perfectly. Parents are told to stay calm, be consistent, encourage independence, set boundaries, provide nutritious food, limit screens, create enriching experiences and, somehow, enjoy every moment because it all goes so quickly.
Those expectations can accumulate, particularly when ordinary life is happening alongside them. Work, money, relationships, caring responsibilities, lack of sleep and everything else do not disappear because you have a toddler.
You can love your child enormously and still find parenting exhausting. Those things are not opposites.
When your toddler is having a tantrum
There isn’t one technique guaranteed to stop every tantrum, and anyone who has spent time with a toddler probably knows that already. What can help is thinking about what may be happening underneath the behaviour, while also keeping your own capacity in mind.
Check the simple things first
Sometimes the explanation really is hunger, tiredness, boredom or overstimulation. Toddlers do not always recognise those needs themselves, let alone explain them.
If difficult behaviour regularly appears at a particular time of day or in a particular situation, noticing the pattern can make things easier to anticipate. That doesn’t mean every tantrum can be prevented, but it might help you understand why 5.30pm keeps becoming rather eventful.
Stay as calm as you reasonably can
A calm adult can help a child whose emotions have become overwhelming, but the important word is reasonably. Parents are human, and there will be times when you become frustrated too.
The aim isn’t to achieve saint-like serenity throughout toddlerhood. If you feel yourself becoming increasingly angry, make sure your child is safe and give yourself a moment if you can. Taking a few breaths, stepping briefly into another room or asking another adult to take over can be more useful than trying to force yourself through a situation when you are already at your limit.
Name the feeling without changing the boundary
Toddlers are learning the language of emotions as well as everything else. Simple phrases such as “You’re really cross because we have to leave” or “You wanted to do that yourself” can help them begin to connect words with what they are feeling.
Acknowledging an emotion does not mean changing the boundary. You can understand why somebody is furious about leaving the park and still leave the park.
Over time, helping children put words to feelings gives them more ways to communicate what is happening.
Keep boundaries simple
Toddlers need limits as well as understanding. If hitting is not acceptable, it remains unacceptable when the child is angry. If something is unsafe, the answer may still need to be no even if that causes a tantrum.
Clear boundaries are generally easier to understand when they are reasonably consistent. That doesn’t mean every household needs an enormous book of rules. In fact, fewer clear expectations are often easier for everyone involved.
Looking after yourself during the toddler years
Parenting advice often talks about self-care, which can sound faintly ridiculous when what you actually need is eight uninterrupted hours of sleep and somebody else to unload the dishwasher.
Looking after yourself doesn’t have to mean finding large amounts of free time that don’t exist. Sometimes it is much more basic: noticing when you are running on empty, accepting help when it is available and making sure there are still small parts of your life that belong to you as well as to your child.
Notice your own pressure points
When we are exhausted or under pressure, our tolerance becomes smaller. Behaviour you might manage reasonably well on one day can feel unbearable on another.
Notice what tends to make things harder for you. Is it lack of sleep? Trying to get out of the house on time? Having no time alone? Work pressure? Feeling isolated? Carrying most of the parenting responsibility yourself?
Understanding your own pressure points can make it easier to identify what would genuinely help. Sometimes the answer is not another parenting technique. It is getting some rest, sharing a responsibility or having somebody else take over for a while.
Small breaks still count
A break does not have to be half a day at a spa. It might be twenty minutes while somebody else takes your child to the park, sitting quietly with a cup of tea after bedtime, going for a walk on your own or doing something that has nothing whatsoever to do with parenting.
Small periods when nobody requires anything from you can matter, particularly when most of your day is organised around somebody else’s needs.
And if you have people around you who can help, let them. There is no particular virtue in making parenting harder by refusing practical support.
Keep some contact with other adults
Toddlerhood can be surprisingly isolating. You may spend a great deal of time with another human being while still missing adult conversation.
Friends, relatives, toddler groups and other parents can provide something important: perspective. Sometimes you need advice. Sometimes you need someone to tell you their child did exactly the same thing. Sometimes you simply need to have a conversation that does not involve tractors, snacks or whether trousers are currently acceptable.
Connection matters for parents too.
Toddler groups can support parents as well as children
This article originally grew out of work Green Ribbons delivered with Lossie 2-3 Group in Lossiemouth. That connection is a useful reminder that toddler groups can offer much more than activities for children.
Children get opportunities to play, explore and be around other children. Parents and carers get conversation, shared experience and sometimes the reassuring discovery that whatever strange phase is happening in their house is also happening in three houses nearby.
Community matters particularly during stages of life that can otherwise feel repetitive or isolating. You don’t necessarily need a formal parenting programme. Sometimes having somewhere familiar to go, a reason to leave the house and people who know your name makes a difference.
Try not to compare your parenting with everybody else’s
Comparison is particularly easy when children are young. Someone else’s child appears to sleep beautifully, eat vegetables, speak in complete sentences and walk happily beside the buggy while yours has spent ten minutes protesting because you peeled the banana they specifically asked you to peel.
Children develop differently, and families are different too. What works brilliantly for another parent may be completely unsuitable for your child, your circumstances or your own temperament.
Social media can make those comparisons even harder because we tend to see other families in selected moments rather than in the full, untidy reality of daily life.
Parenting advice is most useful when it gives you ideas to try, not another set of standards against which to judge yourself. Take what helps and leave what doesn’t.
Repair matters more than getting everything right
You will lose your patience sometimes. You will handle a situation in a way you later wish you hadn’t. You may say something too sharply, choose a battle that wasn’t worth having or discover halfway through a tantrum that you are now almost as upset as the toddler.
Parents don’t need to get every interaction right.
What matters is what happens afterwards. When things are calmer, you can reconnect. If you shouted, you can apologise. You can offer comfort, talk about what happened in simple terms and try a different approach next time.
Children learn from those moments too. Relationships are not built by never getting anything wrong; they are also built through reconnecting after difficult moments.
When parenting feels like too much
There is a difference between finding parenting difficult and feeling as though you are no longer coping.
If you are persistently low or anxious, feeling overwhelmed most of the time, struggling to function or finding that anger and frustration are becoming difficult to manage, talk to somebody. That might be your partner, a trusted friend, your health visitor or your GP.
You don’t need to wait until everything has reached breaking point before asking for help. Parenting can be demanding even when things are broadly going well, and support is there for parents as well as children.
If you’re worried about your toddler
Tantrums, frustration, separation anxiety and strong emotions are all common parts of early childhood, but you know your child.
If something about their behaviour or development is worrying you, their distress seems unusually intense or persistent, or you simply have a feeling that something isn’t right, speak to your health visitor or GP.
You don’t need to decide what the explanation is first. Raising a concern is enough.
There is more to the twos than tantrums
The toddler years can be relentless, but they are also a period of extraordinary change. Language grows, personalities emerge and children become increasingly curious about the world around them.
There will be difficult days, and there will probably be moments when your child becomes completely captivated by a puddle, a stone, a bus or something else you haven’t thought about for twenty years.
You do not have to cherish every second. Very few people sincerely cherish a 3am wake-up or a public tantrum.
But amid the frustration, there are good bits too.
Perhaps “terrific twos” is still overselling it slightly, but “terrible” doesn’t tell the whole story either.
