This too shall pass
On one of my parenting email lists (yes, I’m on several) someone recently asked about discipline strategies for two-year-olds. I shared some of the basic approaches that we used — nothing terribly fancy, just stuff like leaving wherever we were when D’s behavior deteriorated, ignoring tantrums at home, validating the emotions even as we said that some ways of showing them were inappropriate. The original poster then asked "how long did this stage last" and I realized that I had no idea.
N is approaching two, and developing some bad behaviors (throwing things being the most frequent). So we’re starting to figure this out again. The boys are sufficiently different that I’m not sure that our experience with D is going to be much help. Except that I think it will help to know that there will come — and sooner than I might have expected — a day when I can’t remember how long this stage lasted.
