She walked over to the drawer where we keep the tupperware, pulled it open, and stood there for a moment, studying the stack of plastic containers. Then she took out the blue lid, turned it over in her hands, and placed it on the floor. She went back for the matching bowl, fit it inside the lid, and stepped back to look at her work. Then she looked up at me, waiting.
I had been watching her, but I wasn’t really seeing her until that moment. I saw a toddler playing with kitchen stuff. But she saw a completed task. She had a plan, executed it, and wanted me to acknowledge it. That was the moment I realized I had been thinking about her all wrong.
For seventeen months, I had mentally categorized her as a baby. A small person who needed things: milk, sleep, a diaper change, a nap. And she did need those things. But somewhere in the last few weeks, she had become someone with opinions, preferences, and a working memory. She stores information. She makes predictions. She has a sense of humor.
I noticed it first at the grocery store. She sits in the cart facing me, and she has started to point at things she recognizes. She points at the bananas, then at me, then back at the bananas. I said, “Yes, those are bananas.” She pointed again, more insistent. I realized she wasn’t asking me to name them. She was telling me she knew what they were. She wanted confirmation, not information.
That distinction matters. I had been treating our interactions as one-way streets. I talk, she absorbs. But that’s not how it works anymore. She is actively interpreting what I do and say. She is forming theories about how the world works based on my reactions.
One morning, she was playing with a shape sorter. She picked up the square block and tried to push it through the round hole. It didn’t fit. She tried again, harder. Still no. She looked at me. I could see her processing the problem. She wasn’t frustrated yet. She was puzzling. Then she rotated the block in her hand, looked at the sorter, and turned it to the square hole. It slid through easily. She looked at me again, not for approval, but because she wanted me to see that she had figured something out.
I remember thinking, “You’re only a year and a half old.” But that’s the trap. Age makes us underestimate what is happening inside. We assume that because a child can’t articulate their thoughts, they don’t have complex thoughts at all. That’s a parenting blind spot.
In practical terms, this realization changed how I talk to her. I used to narrate everything in a simple, sing-song way. “We’re going to put on your shoes now. Look, here are your shoes. Shoes on feet.” That serves a purpose, but I have shifted. I now talk to her like a person who is learning, not a person who is empty.
Instead of saying “Let’s change your diaper,” I say, “I’m going to change your diaper. Can you help me by holding still for a second?” She can’t really hold still, but she understands that I’m about to do something. She anticipates it. She sometimes even reaches for the diaper before I do.
I started telling her what was going to happen next, like she was a colleague rather than a dependent. “I’m going to turn on the bath water now.” “We are going to leave the park in five minutes.” Five minutes is an abstract concept, but I say it anyway. She may not understand time, but she understands the pattern. When I say the same thing each time before we leave, she knows what’s coming. She still doesn’t like it, but the transition is easier because it isn’t a surprise.
Another thing that changed was how I react to her mistakes. She spills water from a cup. In the past, I would have cleaned it up quickly and said “uh oh” and moved on. Now I try to slow down. I get a towel and hand it to her. I say, “The water spilled. Let’s wipe it up.” She doesn’t have the motor skills to actually be helpful yet, but that isn’t the point. The point is that I am showing her that when something goes wrong, there is a response, and she can be part of that response.
This feels like a small parenting shift, but it changes the daily texture of living with a toddler. She is not a black box that needs inputs. She is a person who is trying to build a model of how her family works. She watches everything. She notices who sits in which chair at dinner. She notices when I put my glasses on before leaving the house. She notices patterns in our routine, and she reacts when those patterns break.
There is a downside to this realization. It is much harder to dismiss bad behavior when you recognize the person behind it. When she throws her food on the floor, my first instinct is to say “no” and move on. But now I can see that she is deliberately dropping the food to watch how I react. It’s an experiment. It’s annoying, but it’s also normal. She is testing cause and effect. The food drops. Dad reacts. Does he react the same way every time? She is collecting data.
So I have started to treat that as data collection too. I say, “Food stays on the tray. When you throw it, I’m going to pick it up and we’re done with that food.” I say it calmly, then I follow through. She still throws food sometimes, but the tantrum that follows is shorter because she knows what’s going to happen. I didn’t teach her that by raising my voice. I taught her by being consistent, which is another way of showing respect for her intelligence.
I am not saying I handle this perfectly. I lose patience. I have days where I just want her to stop whining and let me drink my coffee. But seeing her as a person helps me reset my expectations. I don’t expect her to reason like a five-year-old. But I also don’t treat her like a baby anymore.
One afternoon, she found one of my socks on the floor. She picked it up, walked over to her toy bin, and dropped it inside. Then she closed the lid. I laughed. She looked at me with a smile that was not a baby smile. It was the smile of someone who knows they have done something clever and wants the recognition. I told her, “You put the sock away. Thank you.” She clapped. Then she went back to her bin and picked up two more toys, placing them inside carefully.
That memory stayed with me because it wasn’t a lesson I taught her. No one showed her how to tidy up. She observed it. She saw me put things away. She saw that there is a place where objects go. And she decided to imitate that on her own terms. That is the behavior of a person, not a passive receiver. It is a tiny, ordinary thing, but it revealed how much she is absorbing.
I think the biggest adjustment for me has been realizing that she has an inner life that I have no access to. She dreams, she imagines, she has preferences that she doesn’t fully understand. She might prefer the red cup to the blue cup, not because of a reason she can explain, but because of some internal logic I will never fully grasp. I have to accept that I won’t always know what she is thinking. And that is okay, as long as I keep treating her as someone worth trying to understand.
Teachers probably know this earlier than parents do. A classroom full of toddlers forces you to recognize each one as an individual. But at home, it’s easy to slip into shorthand. It is easy to see only the mess, the noise, the neediness. We don’t always pause to see the person behind all of that.
She is not quite an adult, obviously. She still needs me to guide her through almost every part of the day. But I have stopped thinking of her as a problem to be managed and started thinking of her as a companion I am getting to know. It’s a subtle shift, but it has made a huge difference in how I feel at the end of the day. Instead of just being tired, I am also curious about her. I want to see what she thinks of next.
There are still moments where I forget. I will talk over her when she is trying to say something. I will automatically choose her outfit without asking. I will assume she is crying for no reason. But those miss steps are getting rarer.
Last week, I was sitting on the floor with her, building a tower out of blocks. She knocked it over. I built it again. She knocked it over, but this time she laughed before she did it. She knows that knocking things over is funny. She knows the tower falling is part of the game. She is not just a destructive force. She is a collaborator in her own play.
I don’t know what she will be like when she finds language more fully. I worry that we will fight more as she learns to say no clearly. I suspect that knowing she is a person will only make those moments harder, because I won’t be able to pretend she doesn’t have a point. But for now, I am glad I finally noticed.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » She walked over to the drawer where we keep the tupperware, pulled it open, and stood there for a moment, studying the stack of plastic containers