Why I Say ‘New Parents Don’t Come For Me’: What Experienced Parents Know About Normal Toddler Behavior
The mulch was still warm from the afternoon sun when Milo’s scream cut through the playground noise. Another kid had gotten to the bucket swing 10 seconds before he did, and his light-up rain shoe went flying, landing near the stroller of a mom I’d seen at a few new parent meetups, her 6-month-old strapped to her chest in a linen carrier. I stayed on the splintered park bench, took another sip of my lukewarm iced latte, and didn’t jump up to intervene. I saw her glance from the shoe to me, then to Milo, who was now folded face-down in the wood chips screaming so hard his shoulders shook, and her mouth tightened a little. I knew that look. I’d had that look, once. New parent don’t come for me, I thought to myself. Not today.
Three and a half years ago, when Milo was still a bump under my shirt, I would have been right there with her, judging the woman who just sat there while her toddler lost his mind in public. I took three positive parenting workshops before my due date, curated a shelf of all-wood open-ended toys with nary a plastic battery in sight, and shared infographics to my Instagram story about zero screen time before age 2 and the importance of gentle boundaries from day one. I’d stood in the back of library storytime when Milo was 10 months old, watched a 2-year-old bite his mom’s forearm over a neon Elmo puppet, and whispered to my husband that that would never be us. If you put the work in early, I thought, if you responded correctly to every cue, you got a calm, reasonable kid who didn’t throw shoes or scream over swings. Bad behavior, I figured, was just bad parenting with extra steps.
That illusion lasted until Milo was 20 months old, at a cousin’s backyard birthday party. He’d been quiet for two minutes by the dessert table, and by the time I looked over, he’d grabbed a full chocolate cupcake, peeled the wrapper off, and shoved half the frosting in his mouth before anyone could sing happy birthday. When I gently pried the rest out of his hand, he grabbed a plastic party fork off the table and threw it as hard as he could. It caught his great-aunt on the shoulder. I knelt down, used the calm, even tone I’d practiced in my workshops, said all the lines about being mad not being an excuse to throw things, and reached for his hand to move him away from the table. He leaned in and bit my forearm, hard enough to leave faint teeth marks for three days. I carried him screaming to the empty front hallway, sat down on the tile, and cried a little while he shrieked into my shirt. I’d done everything by the book. How was this happening?
At his well visit a week later, I rolled up my sleeve and showed his pediatrician the faint mark, rambled through all the scripts I’d tried, all the rules I’d stuck to, and asked what I was doing wrong. She leaned back in her rolling chair, laughed, and told me she’d raised four boys of her own, and she still had a scar on her wrist from her second’s 2-year-old molars. “The part of his brain that stops him from doing the first impulsive thing that pops into his head isn’t done growing yet,” she said. “It won’t be fully online for another two, three years at least. You can teach him all the rules you want, but when he’s upset or excited, that little brake doesn’t work. That’s not bad behavior. That’s practice.” That was the first thing that made all the tight, anxious pressure in my chest loosen. I’d spent two years thinking every outburst was a failure on my part, a sign I’d messed up all the work I’d put in early. I thought my job was to stop the meltdowns from happening at all. It turns out my job was just to be there while they happened.
I unlearned a lot of rules after that. I used to think I had to talk him through every single big feeling mid-scream, naming the emotion and walking through what he could do differently next time, even when he was too far gone to make eye contact. Now, when he collapses into a meltdown over the wrong color cup or a sticker that’s slightly crooked, I just move close enough that he can reach me if he wants, hand him his water, and wait. When his brain’s stuck in that fight-or-flight screaming mode, words don’t land. The lesson doesn’t have to happen in the middle of the storm. Half the time, once he catches his breath, he just wipes his snot on my shirt and runs off to play, and I don’t rehash it. The practice of sitting through a hard feeling with someone nearby adds up, one meltdown at a time. You don’t have to hammer a lesson in every single time.
I unlearned the rule that I had to win every single standoff, too. I used to dig my heels in over every limit: no cookies before dinner, no shows before breakfast, no leaving the house in rain boots on an 80 degree day, no exceptions. Now? If he’s skipped his nap, we’ve both had a long day of errands, and he’s begging for one graham cracker 10 minutes before I put pasta on the table, I usually give it to him. One cracker doesn’t erase the 99 other nights the rule holds. His little brain can’t handle every single limit on low energy, and neither can mine. I still keep the wooden toys on the shelf, but I also keep a charged tablet in my diaper bag for days I need 20 uninterrupted minutes to answer a work email or take a shower without him climbing into the tub with me. Twenty minutes of Bluey a few times a week doesn’t cancel out the three hours we spend at the park or the stack of library books we read before bed every night. It’s just a tool, not a moral failure.
Back at the playground, after five minutes of screaming into the mulch, Milo pushed himself up, wiped his face on his shirt, and wandered over to the swing line. He stood there for another two minutes, waited until the other kid climbed off, said “my turn please?” in a small wobbly voice, and climbed on. The new mom wandered over a minute later, adjusting her baby’s hat, and apologized for staring. “All the books say you have to validate every feeling immediately, right?” she said. “I’ve just never seen anyone let it run its course like that.” I told her I used to think the same thing, that I’d judged so many parents before I had a toddler of my own. I told her the line I think to myself all the time now: new parent don’t come for me. I’m not doing it wrong, I’m just working with the brain he has right now, not the one I thought he’d have when I was pregnant.
It’s not like I’ve got it all figured out. Last week I yelled when he poured an entire full cup of milk on the living room rug just to watch it spread, and I had to sit down and apologize to him 10 minutes later when I calmed down. Last month I found him coloring the inside of the lower kitchen cabinet with a purple crayon, and when I asked him what he was doing, he looked me dead in the eye and said “the dog did it.” We don’t even have a dog. Some days I still catch myself side-eyeing a parent of a 7-year-old whose kid is throwing a fit over something that seems tiny to me, and I have to remind myself I haven’t hit that stage yet. I don’t know what battles they’re fighting that I can’t see.
I saw that same playground mom at the grocery store last week. Her baby’s 10 months old now, just started crawling and pulling every single thing off the lower shelves. Her hair was in a half-fallen ponytail, an episode of Ms. Rachel was playing on her phone propped in the cup holder, and she was prying a box of fruit snacks out of his fist while he fussed. She saw me standing by the bananas, laughed, and mouthed I get it now. I waved and didn’t walk over to give her unsolicited advice. Some things you don’t learn from a workbook or an Instagram infographic. You just learn them when the shoe flies, the cupcake gets grabbed, and your perfect plans dissolve into mulch and chocolate frosting. Some days it works. Some days you still get bitten. That’s just the job, as far as I can tell.
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