Why Is My Toddler Mean On Purpose? What I Learned When My Toddler’s Naughtiness Made Me Laugh
Yesterday morning, I was halfway through folding a load of my 2-year-old Leo’s tiny stretchy pants, my still-steaming coffee perched on the edge of the coffee table, when he padded over from the play rug. He’d been stacking plastic farm pigs for 10 minutes, so I’d gotten lulled into a false sense of productivity. He didn’t climb, didn’t grab, just stood there, locked eyes with me, and in one very slow, very deliberate movement, pressed his palm to the side of my mug and pushed it off.
It hit the rug with a dull splat, dark brown coffee seeping into the off-white fibers I’d just deep-cleaned two weeks prior. I tensed up, my mouth already opening to bark the sharp “Leo, no!” I’d been trained to spit out in these moments. And then I saw his face: both dimples out, eyebrows lifted like he was waiting for the fireworks, the exact same grin he gets when he hides from me during peekaboo. I snort-laughed before I could stop myself.
That’s the thing no one tells you about toddlerhood: sometimes your kid is being a jerk on purpose, and if you’re being honest, it’s kind of funny.
This isn’t the first time, obviously. Last week he pulled his 4-year-old sister’s favorite sparkly mermaid doll right out of her lap while she was mid-story, carried it over to the kitchen trash can, held eye contact the entire time he dropped it in. Three days ago, I told him we were done with snacks before dinner, so he stood in front of the snack drawer, wiggled his eyebrows at me, and opened it anyway, pouring an entire bag of cheddar goldfish across the kitchen floor. Every single time, it’s intentional. He knows it’s something we’ve told him not to do. He’s not tired, he’s not hungry (okay, sometimes he’s hungry, but not always). He just does it.
When I mentioned this to a friend at playgroup last week, she started apologizing for how her own toddler acts sometimes, like it’s a failure of parenting. I get it. I was there six months ago. When Leo first started doing this, I’d panic. I thought if I didn’t crack down immediately on every intentional act of naughtiness, he’d grow up to be the kind of kid who cuts people in line and teases his classmates. I’d raise my voice, put him in time-out, and he’d just stand there crying, confused, and I’d be left feeling like the worst mom alive.
What I’ve learned since is that this isn’t bad behavior, not really. It’s just science. Around age 2, toddlers figure out two big things at once: first, that they are their own person, separate from me, with their own wants and the ability to make things happen. Second, that their actions get big reactions from other people. So they run experiments. Pushing coffee off the table isn’t about making mom mad. It’s about testing: if I do this, what happens? Does the mug fall? Does mom make a loud noise? How does the spill spread across the rug? That’s all really interesting data when you’ve only been alive for 24 months.
I’ve tried a lot of different approaches, and the ones that work aren’t the strict, high-stakes routines I read about in early parenting books. First, I draw a clear line between acts that hurt people and acts that just make a mess. If he pushes his sister or pulls a stranger’s hat off at the park, I don’t laugh. I get down to his level, I say “That hurt [Name], that’s not okay. We don’t do things that make people sad.” Then I help him fix it—he helps pick up the hat, he gives his sister a hug, that’s it. No big scene, no 2-minute time-out that he won’t remember anyway.
If it’s just a mess, though? If it’s coffee or goldfish or dumped clean laundry, I almost always give him the reaction he’s looking for, just not the angry one. I name the experiment out loud first: “You wanted to see what would happen if you pushed my coffee off the table, right? That was a fun experiment.” Then I give him a safe place to run more experiments like that. We keep a stack of old plastic cups and empty yogurt containers on the bottom step of our playroom, and I tell him he can push all of them off whenever he wants. I gave him a whole lower drawer in the kitchen full of tupperware and old wooden spoons that he can open and close and dump out as much as he wants. Most of the time, that’s enough. He gets to test his new power over the world, I don’t have a coffee spill every 10 minutes. After we name the experiment, we clean up the mess together, which is just another fun activity for him, half the time.
It doesn’t work every time. Yesterday he dumped my favorite succulent, the one I’ve had since college, out of its pot all over the living room carpet. That time I didn’t laugh. I told him it was my favorite plant, it made me really sad that he dumped it, and he had to help me pick up all the dirt. He gave me a sloppy hug, then ran off to push his plastic cups off the step anyway. I still yell sometimes when I’m tired after a long work day. I still worry sometimes that I’m letting him get away with too much, or that I’m correcting him too little.
But it’s a lot better than it used to be. I don’t spend every day stressed that he’s turning into a bad kid. He’s just a kid, figuring out how the world works, running one little experiment at a time. And when the experiment doesn’t break anything or hurt anyone? It’s kind of fun to laugh along with him.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » Why Is My Toddler Mean On Purpose