The Emotional Life of the Toddler 1 The Emotional Importance of Early Relationships Living with a child between 1 and 3 years of age is an exhilarating experience. Who else could show us so convincingly that a wet, muddy leaf lying on the ground is actually a hidden marvel or that splashing in the bathtub can bring ultimate joy? Toddlers have the gift of living in the moment and finding wonder in the ordinary. They share those gifts by helping the adults they love to reconnect with the simple pleasures of life. But toddlers have dark moments, too. They are notoriously willful and unpredictable. Their behavior can be difficult to understand and strenuous to handle. At times parents find themselves caught in a contest of wills, vaguely embarrassed at being unable to win more handily at this uneven match. Other times they are simply at a loss.
It is hard to fathom what the child is asking for, and the child cannot explain. He or she can only act, repeating the same behavior again and again until the parent finally deciphers the message and comes up with an appropriate response. Examples of toddler behavior begging for an explanation are many. * Blair hits his head against the wall if he is angry or frustrated. * Eddy cries with hunger but rejects every choice his mother offers him for dinner. * Sandra screams and tries to hide when she sees a picture of an elephant waving his long trunk in a children''s book. * Lenya lets go of her father''s hand and runs toward a horse galloping in the field next to her house. * Mary looks for her mother all over the house only to run out of the room as soon as she finds her.
* Marty goes back and forth between crying to be held and demanding to be put down. These and many other behaviors defy adult logic. Why would a child seek pain, choose to stay hungry, become terrified of a harmless picture, rush into danger, search for her mother only to run away from her, or want comforting while rejecting it at the same time? Though inexplicable from the perspective of grown-ups, these reactions make perfect sense from the viewpoint of a child who is 1, 2, or 3 years old. This book tries to explain why this is so. The ideas presented are my personal synthesis of child observation, clinical work with toddlers and their families, theories of development, and current research findings. The organizing themes come from attachment theory, which was developed by psychoanalyst John Bowlby and psychologist Mary Ainsworth to explain the intense need that all children in the first three years of life have for a close relationship with their parents and a small number of cherished adults. The basic premise of attachment theory is that toddlers can grow into happy and competent children if they can rely on at least one adult who makes them feel safe and protected. From this basic feeling of security in relationships grows the impetus to explore how things work in the world and to try out new skills.
1, 2 The most important emotional accomplishment of the toddler years is reconciling the urge to become competent and self-reliant with the simultaneous and sometimes contradictory longing for parental love and protection. This process is apparent in the behavior of toddlers who have recently mastered walking on their own. The child moves back and forth between staying close to the parent, moving away to do things on her own, and going back to the parent to share discoveries, to be comforted, or simply to "recharge batteries" with a hug or a cuddle before going off yet again for another bout of exploration. They are practicing the balance between their need for autonomy and their need for protection. In order to explore and learn, they need reassurance that the parent will be there to keep them safe while they do things on their own. Parents serve as the home base for the toddler''s explorations. When they respond to the child''s experiences with encouragement and understanding, this home base becomes a secure base. The child derives a feeling of security from the parent''s support, and this security generates the self-confidence to seek larger horizons.
Different toddlers use the secure base provided by the parents in different ways. Some children are shy and retiring by temperament, and they need more time close to the parents before they are ready to explore on their own. Other children can hardly be held back because they are very active and enthralled by novelty. Temperamental tendencies put an individual stamp on how toddlers use their parents and other caregivers as a secure base for their explorations. Yet most adults are neither fixed in one place nor infinitely available. The secure base is human, and the parent has to attend to aspects of life other than being responsive to the child. Parents have many roles in addition to being parents: they have a work life, a social life, and a private life, in addition to the multiple demands of everyday existence. The separate needs and wishes of parents and toddlers need to be negotiated and balanced in a reasonably mutually satisfactory way.
What "satisfactory" means, in turn, differs from family to family and changes in the course of development depending on many factors, including societal opportunities and pressures, the parents'' cultural expectations and values, and the individual characteristics and relationship styles of the parents and the child. In striving for family harmony, it helps to remember that satisfaction is often the art of the possible. The English pediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, who was renowned for his deep understanding of the mother-child relationship, coined the term "good-enough mother" to help mothers and society at large relinquish the fantasy that there is such a thing as a perfect mother--or that there should be. Many mothers use "good enough" as a mantra to repeat when they are flooded by guilt and regret that they cannot give their children the ideal life that we all yearn for and that eludes us all. When the child first begins to walk, parents postpone or adjust many of their own wishes and plans because the new physical and emotional demands of locomotion often call for urgent, immediate attention and quick action. As toddlers get firmer on their feet and acquire greater self-control between about 18 and 24 months, parents are under less pressure to defer to the child. They increasingly expect the toddler to adjust to the adults'' plans and wishes rather than the other way around. The themes of physical and emotional safety must remain a priority throughout the toddler years because parents cannot rely on the child''s self-control or ability to judge what is safe and what is dangerous.
Toddlers'' impetus to move and explore is much more powerful than their capacity to anticipate the consequences of their actions. The areas of the brain that involve logical thinking, abstract reasoning, self-restraint, and long-term planning take a long time to develop and may not be fully mature until early adulthood. As a result, the first years of life have the grim distinction of being also the most risky ones, with the highest likelihood of life-threatening as well as minor accidents such as falls, burns, ingestion of nonfood and sometimes poisonous items, and near drowning. Parents and other caregivers may find themselves taken by surprise, unable to anticipate or keep up with the quick mobility of a single-minded toddler who is intent on exploring how the world works. Physical safety depends on the caregivers'' capacity to identify and respond promptly to sources of danger, which demands ongoing alertness to the child''s whereabouts. Emotional safety results from children''s consistent experience that parents and other caregivers will be available to protect them and respond to their signals of need. Though physical danger and safety are usually clear-cut, the experience of emotional safety is not monochromatic. Many of the power struggles so prevalent in the second and third years of life stem from parents'' and children''s disparate perceptions of danger and their often incompatible but nonnegotiable individual agendas.
Parents and other caregivers are often exhausted by the extraordinary zest of toddlers for being on the move, their refusal to take naps, and the quick pace of their darting off, climbing, running, and jumping. Two efficient strategies to decrease parent and child mutual frustration are creating safe spaces for toddlers that decrease the need for constant parental intervention and redirecting their attention by enticing them away from forbidden pursuits. In this sense, physical safety and emotional security can go hand in hand. This is also the time when many socialization pressures begin. Toddlers are asked to live up to many new parental expectations in a short period of time. We want them to relinquish the satisfactions of being a baby and trade them in for the more ambiguous pleasures of growing up. Most toddlers experience toilet training, giving up the bottle, falling asleep on their own, and complying with the rules of the household as impositions that are more trouble than they are worth. They respond by refusing to do things before they are ready and by throwing a tantrum if all else fails.
Yet those protests come at an emotional cost. Toddlers are scared that displeasing their parents will result in losing their love, and this fear finds expression in the comm.