Toddler

It’s easy to see how it happens. You’ve had a string of broken nights and too-early mornings. Your coffee just made you feel edgy, not better. Everywhere you look, there are things that need to be done: dishes, laundry, clutter. And you can’t do them because your 18-month-old is clingy and contrary — maybe he’s teething or maybe he’s in the throes of toddler negativity. Whatever it is, he is not fun to be with.

Then you serve lunch, and he suddenly freaks out about being put in his high chair, throws himself backward shrieking as you lift him in, kicks your soup bowl off the table and somehow manages to jab your eye as he flails. And you feel it: a flare of red-hot rage so strong it leaves you shaky — and shaken.

What kind of parent can you be, to have such hateful feelings toward your own little child?

A perfectly normal parent, says Laura Bradley, a Vancouver family counsellor. “This is one of the most intense relationships we have,” she says. “And it is the only one where we expect ourselves to have loving thoughts toward another person all the time!”

The toddler stage — when children yo-yo between clinginess and defiance and are driven to push us in their push toward autonomy — is bound to trigger our anger at times. That’s OK, says Bradley; what’s important is how we deal with it.

Originally published in Today's Parent, December 2007