For some of us, our little munchkins are now toddlers. Adorable they are, with their little personalities but they are also at a developmental stage where we may be asking ourselves more and more why is s/he doing that?

Our parenting your toddler workshop is underway and the most common questions were around sleep, tantrums, discipline, crying, potty training, power struggles, TV time and work life balance.

Today our session was about active listening, expectations we place on our toddlers and emotional fitness in children.  We had Holly Kretschmer, Psychotherapist & Parent educator as our guest speaker.

Guess what! I'm a huge fan of active listening. This technique really gives us a chance to communicate with our children and hear how they are feeling.  To demonstrate I've added a few pictures from yesterday.  

You may think those are decorations in my bamboo plant, but no those are cheerios and cantaloupe.  I'm making dinner and Katelyn asks me for water, so I gave her water. I looked over and she is watering the plant... "awww so cute" I thought to myself.  I'm busy preparing dinner and she is at the table supposedly snacking.  about half an hour later I notice there are cheerios and other food in the water.  So I asked her, Katelyn, why you do that?  "I'm feeding the plant mommy, it's hungry" was her reply. I can only assume that since she gives the plant water b/c it's thirsty then giving it food when it's hungry would make sense. I said, "that was nice of you to feed the plant babe, but that is not the type of food it eats".  I saw her mouth making an O then she showed me the other plants she had fed :-)   I asked her to help me clean up the plants to reinforce the idea that we do not leave this type of food in the plant.

My first reaction could have been to think she is destroying the plant or she did this to be bad, but it's really important to try and find out "what" your toddler's behaviour means. Maybe your toddler isn't able to express clearly with their words why they did it, which makes it harder to understand - but chances are they didn't do it to be bad. They may even believe they are doing it to help you and then don't understand why you are upset. 

We also talked about Emotional Fitness and trauma and clarified some information with the group that Trauma is caused by long-term neglect over the life of a person and a single small event will not create long-term trauma. 

Overall a great session, not every technique and philosophy will work for you and your child. We hope to give you information and best practices to use going forward so you can make informed parenting decisions.


Do you have any active listening stories to share?

-Claire