Caroline Deacon
Journalist and author based in Scotland, UK

In Print

Teach Yourself Your Toddler's Development

Hodder £8.99

Chapter 01 – introduction - the birth of the toddler

In this chapter you will learn

• How your toddler’s brain has developed so far and the significance of this
• What your role is in parenting your toddler
• How parenting a toddler impacts on you
• How this book works and what it can do for you

Congratulations! You have survived that critical time of transition to parenthood, have looked after a baby and survived. Really it would only be fair if life could settle down now and become easier after those early months, but no, your baby is now turning into a toddler, and presenting you with a whole new set of challenges. You may indeed be an expert in parenting your baby, but unfortunately your child is no longer that baby, and you are now a novice again, wondering where the instruction manual is this time. While this book may not be able to tell you where the on/off switch is, it will hopefully explain why your baby has morphed into this stranger, why he behaves as he does, and offer you some suggestions on how to cope. It will also help you understand your role in aiding this small person to develop into a bigger, more rounded, more secure and more intelligent person.

A: The birth of a toddler

It’s quite a sobering thought to consider that as your baby gets moving and officially becomes a toddler, despite the fact you have had him around for several months, if he were the offspring of any other species, he would only just be born. Extrapolating from other species, scientists have worked out that human babies are born about nine months too early. Yes, that pregnancy, which seemed to go on forever as it was, should really have lasted eighteen months!

Our species is the most successful one on the planet for two reasons, firstly because we are intelligent and can problem solve, reason and make tools, and secondly because we can adapt to the environment we find ourselves in; be it artic or tropics, we can survive.

Intelligence requires a big brain and therefore a big head, but walking upright on two legs to leave our hands free for making tools means having a narrow pelvis, and immediately as you can see, there is a conflict. How could we give birth to babies with big heads and still walk upright? The answer is to give birth to premature babies, and thus our babies are born nine months too early.

Yet despite the fact that being born early is risky, as babies are thus incredibly vulnerable, being born early also helps in that second success strategy, adapting to the environment, and thus our babies’ brains do most of their growing in their particular environment, thereby moulding themselves to cope with a diet of fruit, fish or whalemeat, to speak Japanese or English, to be emotionally inhibited with a “stiff upper lip” or uninhibited and emotionally volatile.

A: How your toddler’s brain develops

So your toddler was born nine months early, but this means he can adapt to his environment. Because his brain does most of its growing outside the womb, it grows in response to what is needed.

In the first year of life, your toddler’s brain doubled in size to become half the size it will be as an adult. By the time he is three years old, his brain will be three quarters its final size.  It is also a very busy brain! At age two, his brain uses the same amount of energy as yours does even though it is only half the size of yours, and at age three it will use twice the energy of yours. It will stay this busy until he is about nine or ten years of age, when it gradually reduces to reach adult levels around age 18.

Why is your toddler’s brain so busy? It’s setting up connections. At birth each neuron (brain cell) has around 2,500 synapses (connections) and these increase in number rapidly, reaching a peak at around two to three years of age when there are about 15,000 synapses per neuron, more than are present in the adult brain. So even though all the neurons he will ever need are present at birth, the changes in the size of his brain are to do with growing and making connections. As a connection is used it strengthens and grows, pushing the neurons apart. After age three, your toddler’s brain starts deleting all the connections which are not used, while the ones that carry the most messages get stronger and survive. You could think of your toddler as one big potential. All those connections waiting to be used, to be strengthened by experience, or pruned when not needed. In fact it sounds quite frightening to consider that children lose about 20 billion synapses per day between early childhood and adolescence. It is this pruning throughout time which means children become less flexible and creative, less suggestible but also become more efficient, able to remember things, to recall them efficiently, and to become self-aware.

Thus when a baby is born, he is incredibly adaptable; his brain can take him in whichever direction is needed. If one part of his brain is damaged then another part can take over. If something is not needed it can be deleted, allowing that part of the brain to be used for something else. Deaf children for instance use the part of the brain that would normally become the auditory cortex to process visual information instead. If you live in an environment with lots of horizontal and vertical lines (like a city) you get better at spotting things that are horizontal and vertical, whereas if you were raised in Northern America in a tepee as are Canadian Indian babies, then you would be better at seeing oblique orientations. If you live in Yorkshire you become acutely attuned to Yorkshire vowels, being able to tell whether the speaker comes from your own county or from Lancashire, Northumberland or the Midlands, and although you would recognise words spoken in an American accent as being English, you would not be able to tell the difference between a New Yorker, Texan or Californian.

A: Why you are important to your toddler

During the first year of your toddler’s life, his brain was wiring up in response to his environment, and this shaping continues through these formative toddler years. Even though your toddler will not remember much, if anything at all, from these early years, you are incredibly important in moulding this individual at this age. Never again will you have so much influence on a person! You are literally creating a human being through the way you interact with him.

What your toddler needs is lots of consistency. You will find yourself repeating things over and over again, but this is what he needs. He is also experimenting with you, pushing at boundaries, trying to establish what he can and cannot do, what the world expects from him.

Nowadays we have a choice, and you can choose what kind of parent you want to be, how you want your family life to be. Some people like a real sense of order and routine, some like to be more spontaneous. But perhaps now is a good time to take stock of your life, consider what is really important now that you are a family, because your values will be imbedded in your child.

A: How parenting a toddler feels

Having recovered from that massive, life changing experience of becoming a parent, having finally recovered from the birth and subsequent exhaustion of feeding a baby day and night, seeing your baby’s personality emerge and his interest in the world develop, perhaps to a point where life began to feel calm and in control again, your baby turns into a toddler, and suddenly you are back in stress mode again, as he throws new challenges at you.
 
As toddlerhood progresses, your child can seem very physical, needing to explore and try everything. Incapable of waiting, he needs immediate gratification. In some ways it feels as if he has turned against you. He rages against you and you can do nothing right. At other times you realise that you are still his “hero”. He wants to imitate and join in everything you are doing. Living with this physical and emotional whirlwind can be immensely tiring. Make sure you make time for yourself too, to recuperate your energy.  If you are at home full-time with your child, make sure you get regular time off; after all no other job demands a seven day week commitment, and neither should parenting. If you are at work, then no doubt you want to spend as much time as possible with your toddler to make up for this, but you also need time to yourself to recharge your own batteries.

The other big source of conflict with a toddler is our different speeds of doing things. Toddlers are simply incapable, for instance, of walking for long distances in a straight line. They have no sense of wanting to get somewhere, they prefer to enjoy where they are.  When you are with your child, your pace of life needs to slow right down. To avoid feeling frustrated, plan your day with lots of leeway, and always be flexible. Does it matter if it takes an hour to post a letter? This era, of dawdling, of stopping to explore every new thing, won’t last long and should be savoured before you are both forever dashing to meet deadlines, school times etc.

• When you are with your toddler, go at his pace and let him drive the agenda, but make sure you are really fully present.
• This also means making sure you have time in the week when you are not with your toddler, time off to do your own thing and disengage your brain
• If you need to get somewhere with your toddler, allow at least twice as long as you would normally do
• You can win battles with your toddler because you are bigger and stronger than he is, but this is a hollow victory. Far better to interact positively with your toddler, and this means understanding why he behaves the way he does and adapting your life to his needs as far as is possible – bullets ends

A: How this book works

The purpose of this book is for you to understand how your toddler is developing, and what you can do to help this development. Understanding this will also help you to understand why he behaves the way he does. Because parents of toddlers often find themselves grappling with behaviour issues, unable to raise their heads and see beyond the tantrums and the food fights, the book starts with a section called “the issues” where we consider the main behaviour issues, why they happen, and what you could do about them.

After this we get into the more fun stuff; looking at how your toddler actually develops and what you can do to help. The first part looks at your how your toddler fits into the world; his role in the family, how he becomes emotionally secure and socially aware. We will have already looked at this briefly in the “issues” section, but here there is more time to look at helping your child become an emotionally and socially settled human being.

We then look at your toddler’s creative and intellectual development. Eventually he will grow up into an intelligent human being, capable of all sorts of rational, abstract and creative thinking; how does he get there? As a toddler, he develops his intellect mostly through play, and this section looks at all the different types of play, what they do for your child, and what you need to do to help. We also look at the role of TV, computer and indeed formal education in your toddler’s intellectual and creative development.

Finally we look at how he actually organises his brain into an intelligent tool; how he builds up knowledge, how he recalls or remembers it, and how he learns to speak, and what this means for his developing intelligence.

The book ends with a section on special developmental situations which may becoming of interest to you at this stage – issues like autism, ADHD and dyslexia, as well as giving you more information and resources if you want to take any of this information further.

Given that time is probably the one thing you don’t have, you should be able to dip in and out of sections as needed, and hopefully find quick answers to your queries. But above all the hope is that this book will provide you with plenty of ideas to help you enjoy life with a toddler to the full.

A: Summary of this chapter

• Babies are born nine months too early, which allows them to develop in response to their environment
• Your toddler’s brain is incredibly busy, making connections in response to the world in which he lives
• You are therefore incredibly influential in moulding your toddler into a the person he will become
• Today parents can choose how they want to parent, so it is important that you make time to talk through the way you want to be
• Parenting a toddler is very tiring, so you must make time to recharge your own batteries