Toddler

Ever wonder why your two-year-old refuses to eat a broken cookie and yet will happily chomp down on a broken crayon? Or how the food she was literally begging for yesterday suddenly ended up on her “most hated” list today? To find out what’s behind these and other toddler mysteries, we turned to four experts who have done time in the toddler trenches: Jeffrey Derevensky, a professor in the department of psychiatry at McGill University; Mary Lou Vernon, a researcher and instructor in the department of psychology at the University of Western Ontario; Sara Dimerman, founder and director of the Parent Education Resource Centre in Thornhill, Ontario; and Cathy Kerr, an early childhood consultant with Community Living Toronto. In shedding light on these oh-so-baffling habits, our panel confirmed that most of them are perfectly normal and usually short-lived.

Before you know it, your child will have embarked on a whole new round of thoroughly puzzling preschool behaviours.

Mystery #1 - Your toddler suddenly develops a strange, unexplained fear.

The toilet plunger at our house has only recently migrated back indoors. During the years when my youngest son, Ian, was a toddler, it lived in the garage. The reason? Ian was deathly afraid of plungers. (We only realized how afraid when he started kindergarten; while other kids were busy drawing people and houses, he painted toilet plungers!)

Such fears can be mystifying to the parent, but they generally make perfect sense to the child, says Derevensky. In Ian’s case, there was a logical explanation – although we had to wait until he could talk before we got the scoop. Apparently, he’d walked into the family room one night when his older siblings were watching the episode of The Simpsons in which Homer gets a toilet plunger stuck to his head. Ian’s conclusion: You’re never truly safe while there’s a plunger around. Banishing the object to the garage seemed a small price for having Ian end his bathroom boycott. (To heck with all his hard-earned toilet-training victories. He wasn’t taking any chances.)

Mystery #2 - Your toddler wants your undivided attention the moment you answer the phone.

It doesn’t matter how happily 14-month-old Kyle Doerksen of Saskatoon is playing; the moment his mother, Kara, picks up the phone, he toddles over as fast as he can, grabs her leg and starts wailing for attention. Is Kyle out to drive his mother crazy or is something else going on? The explanation may be as simple as looking at what’s happening when the call comes in, Vernon says. Toddlers hate being interrupted in the middle of a game or some other fun.

And although you keep saying, “I’ll be done in a minute!” don’t expect the message to get through. What’s easy to forget, according to Derevensky, is that toddlers have no concept of time. You might as well be saying, “I’ll be off the phone next week!” One way to silence the clamour: Keep a box of items that are guaranteed to buy you a few minutes’ peace within easy reach of the phone. And next time that ring comes when you and your toddler are doing something special, remember – this is why answering machines were invented.

Originally published in Today's Parent, December 2003