Parenting tricks for toddler tantrums that keep us sane
I was kneeling on the floor holding two socks—one blue, one with a little dog on it—while my two-year-old lay flat on his back, screaming. He didn’t want socks. We were already late for daycare. My first instinct was to just wrestle the socks on and get on with it. But I remembered a trick a friend had told me: offer a choice, but only between two things you’re okay with.
“Do you want the blue sock or the dog sock?”
He stopped crying. He looked at me. “Dog.”
I put the dog sock on one foot. Then, without missing a beat, he said, “Blue.” I put the blue sock on the other foot. We were out the door three minutes later. It wasn’t a miracle. Some mornings he throws both socks and starts over. But that tiny moment taught me something: most of the time, he isn’t actually opposed to socks. He’s opposed to being told what to do.
That’s the theme behind all the small tricks we use to stay sane with our toddler. They’re not big parenting philosophies. They’re just ways to get through the day without everyone crying.
The choice trick is probably the one we use most. Instead of asking “What do you want for a snack?” I say, “Apple or cheese?” Instead of “Let’s get dressed,” I say, “It’s clothes time. Do you want the red shirt or the striped shirt?” It sounds too simple to work, but the key is that both options have to be things I’m okay with either way. I learned that the hard way, asking “What do you want to wear?” and ending up with swim trunks in November. Open-ended questions are too much for a toddler. There are too many possibilities. But a simple choice between two things gives him just enough control to feel like he has a say, and it gives me enough control to get out of the house.
Another trick is using a silly voice. When he refuses to get into the bath, I start singing a nonsense song about a duck swimming in the water. When he won’t put on his coat, I put the coat on my head and say, “This is a hat!” He laughs and reaches for it, and suddenly the coat is on. It feels ridiculous, and some days I really don’t have the energy for it. But it works because it takes the demand out of the moment. It turns “you have to do this” into something closer to a game.
I saw the same thing at his daycare. The teachers don’t get into a direct battle with a child who refuses to wash hands. They make the hands the characters. “Rub-a-dub-dub, Mr. Hand is dirty.” It’s not about distracting them from what matters. It’s about giving them an easier doorway into the thing they need to do.
We also use a timer a lot. Leaving the playground used to be its own war. I’d say, “We need to go now,” and he’d scream like I was taking away the only joy he had ever known. So now we carry a little visual timer with us. I show it to him and say, “When the red goes away, we’re going to walk to the car.” He watches it, a little fascinated. When it beeps, I say, “The timer says it’s time.” It’s not me making the decision anymore. The timer is the grown-up. He still complains sometimes, but a lot less, because he saw it coming.
The timer isn’t magic. We tried using my phone once, and that was a disaster because he just wanted to touch the phone. A simple battery-operated kitchen timer is better. It costs about ten dollars, and it has saved us more times than I can count.
One of the hardest tricks for me to learn was doing less. I remember one morning he wanted a banana. He grabbed it off the counter, and the banana split open at the end. That was it. The world ended. He dropped to the floor and sobbed because the banana was broken. I immediately tried to fix it: “I’ll get you another one.” That made it worse. He wanted that banana. I tried to explain that it was still fine anyway, but that didn’t help either. Eventually I just sat down on the floor next to him and said, “The banana broke. You’re really upset.”
He cried for a few more minutes, and then he stopped, pointed at the fruit bowl, and said, “A banana.” I gave him a new one and he ate it. The meltdown passed once I stopped trying to solve it. The trick wasn’t doing something. It was getting out of the way and letting him feel what he was feeling.
That’s not always possible, of course. Sometimes we’re in a hurry and he’s upset about the wrong shirt, and I just have to put the shirt on him while he thrashes and carries his body out to the car like a wriggling fish. In those moments, the best I can do is say, “I know you’re upset. We have to go anyway.” It doesn’t feel like success. But I’m learning that success is not about avoiding all tears. It’s about not making things worse.
There’s another habit we stole from a parenting class we almost didn’t go to: the “first, then” phrase. “First we brush your teeth, then you can choose the bedtime book.” Or “First we put the blocks away, then we go outside.” The structure is simple. It sets up a sequence, and it also gives him something to look forward to. I try to say “then” instead of “if.” If I say “If you clean up, we’ll read a book,” it sounds like a bribe, and he can sense the condition. When I say “First, then,” it just sounds like the way life works.
We also stopped asking “Do you want to?” so often. “Do you want to put on your shoes?” gives him a chance to say no, and he is extremely good at saying no. So now I phrase things as statements with choices: “It’s shoe time. Red shoes or blue shoes?” It took me a while to realize that I was creating a lot of my own problems by asking questions I didn’t actually want him to answer.
I don’t want to make it sound like we have it all figured out. Some days I lose my temper and yell. Some days the choice trick fails, the silly voice sounds annoying, and the timer gets thrown across the room. There are moments when I look at my child and think, “I have no idea what would get you to stop doing that.” But then we try another small thing.
Right now, the thing that works best is just lowering the stakes. If he doesn’t want to eat breakfast, I leave a cracker on the table where he can see it. If he refuses to walk, I don’t argue; I wait a second longer. Most parents will tell you that toddlers are not a problem to be fixed. They are tiny unpredictable people who are learning how to be human. The tricks don’t solve that. They just make the waiting easier.
We’ll figure out the next stage when we get to it. In the meantime, we still have the blue sock and the dog sock. And there is almost always one of them that he will pick.
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