Check out Part One of our interview below:
Me: My daughter is 20 months and she is a handful.
One of the chapters that truly struck chord with me was the first chapter, where you talk about speaking respectfully to your kids. It’s….
Dr. Jenn: It’s hard.
Me: Yes! It’s hard. As a teacher, I’ve always prided myself on being very firm, but loving with my students, yet I find myself completely losing my top with my daughter.
Dr. Jenn: Don’t forget, though, you were dealing with other people’s children and you were dealing with an age group that was far more verbal and that you could rationalize with. You can’t rationalize with a 20-month old.
Me: No, not at all.
Dr. Jenn: Something for you to keep in mind that this is a very challenging age for everyone. There are certain children that have a temperament that is more challenging than others. I have two kids, as you read in the book, and one of them has more of a challenging temperament than the other. I love them both, I adore them, I can’t get enough of them- but one of them has a more challenging temperament than the other. And that’s okay! You have to really respect that about your child.
Around 18 months, kids start to know what they want, they start to demand it, but they don’t generally have the ability to verbalize everything that they want and need, so they get really frustrated and there are a lot of tantrums at this age.
Me: Oh my dear God, that’s all that ever happens around here. Tantrums.
I gave Dr. Jenn a scenario for something that has been happening a lot recently in my house that I’d love some psychological reasoning/help with:
Me: She brings me her shoes and say “you’re welcome” and that’s all I get and so I don’t know if she wants me to put them on, so I try different things.
- Sometimes, she’ll give me the shoes, say “you’re welcome” and I’ll think why are you giving me your shoes and so I’ll say thank you and I’ll just put them down, but then she’ll start to cry.
- If I don’t do that, then I’ll put the shoes on her and now she wants to go outside.
Dr. Jenn: Okay, when she hands you the shoes, have you tried saying: “Oh are you giving these to me because you want me to put them on you?”
Me: No. I haven’t tried that at all.
Dr. Jenn: Okay, well that’s where things may have gone awry. She’s at an age now where she doesn’t have the vocabulary. She may have said “you’re welcome” because she meant help me or thank you, but she doesn’t quite have it straight yet. Part of your job at this stage that will ultimately make your job easier in the long run and maybe make your job a little easier now is to help give her the words to express her needs.
Let’s just say that she thinks “you’re welcome” means “help me put on my shoes” and she hands you the shoes and you just put them on- well, you haven’t really taught her to say what she really needs. What we want to do is set up an expectation with our kids that we will understand them and we will help them get their needs met.
So, when she hands you the shoes, say “Oh, are you handing me the shoes because you want me to help you put them on?” or “Oh are you just showing me your shoes?” or “What would you like me to do with your shoes?” You want to encourage her to communicate with you; you want to give her the words to express herself.
Me: What I am realizing too is that when she gives me the shoes it’s because she wants to go outside, but we live in the desert and it gets in the triple digits here on a daily basis, so I try not to take her outside during the day. I usually do early morning or evenings. I don’t know how to redirect her and let her know “okay, we can’t go outside, it’s too hot.” I tell her that, but I feel like she doesn’t understand me and all I get are tears. I’ll ask her “do you want to read a book, do you want to play with your legos?” but she wants to be outside and all I get are tears and I don’t know what to do.
Dr. Jenn: Okay, I’m going to give you a couple of recommendations. Let’s say she wants to go outside, but it’s too hot. Then you say to her: “Right not it’s too hot, but let’s make a plan to go outside when it’s not too hot. Do you want to go outside later tonight or tomorrow morning?” Give her two acceptable choices- that helps.
There are sometimes that you just can’t avoid a tantrum. She wants to go outside right now and that’s it. As a parent, you are making a boundary and that’s it- you’ll get a meltdown and you’ll have to tolerate the meltdown. Ideally, though, you want to help her understand:
1. Why that’s not going to happen. I believe it’s respectful to let kids know why their request is not being met and
2. You want to give her two acceptable options. What you want to do at this age is give the power back to her. Give her acceptable options and let her choose, because that’s empowering to her to be able to choose between going outside tonight or tomorrow.
Me: I have been trying to do what you said in your book in regards to narrating to her. For example, I’ll say something like: “I know you’re really upset because you can’t play with the ball anymore, but it’s time to put it away and we can play with it again later or tomorrow.” Something like that. I feel like her anger/her feelings- they don’t go away, they are still there.
Dr. Jenn: It doesn’t make them magically go away right away. Let’s say she’s on the floor throwing her tantrum, you could say: “You’re really mad! You really wanted that ball I see how upset you are!” You want to continue to narrate what’s going on for her so that you’re giving her the words for her feelings. One year from now or two years from now, she can say “I’m really angry mom, I really wanted that ball.”
Me: Okay, I guess I’m looking for results that I can see soon, but it’s going to be later on when she can verbalize herself.
Dr. Jenn: It’s going to be later on and if you do the kind of narration that I’m talking about on a day-to-day basis, you will see a decline in tantrums over time.
Me: Okay, cause the tantrums are really bad right now.
Dr. Jenn: This is the age of the tantrum. She is right on course. And of course, some kids are more willful than others, but it’s not necessarily a bad thing. We really have to accept our kids psychological makeup. Your daughter is the child who maybe 10 years from now is going to be the Elementary Schooler that is going to know how to get her needs met; who knows how to get people to help her and that’s a great quality that you want to foster.
Me: I am sure that you’ve heard this before from other parents, but sometimes I feel silly doing the narration to her because I feel like she doesn’t understand. Is it really penetrating in her brain?
Dr. Jenn: Absolutely. Believe me, at 20 months, she knows a lot. There have been studies that have found at 4 months some babies are able to recognize their own name. They really believe that kids understanding are so far before their ability to be able to actually verbalize words. The more you are able to give her the words for her feelings, the better off she is going to be.
Me: We’ve tried time out, do you recommend time outs for her age group? I know she’s supposed to sit down and calm down, but she gets up and does the same thing all over again!
Dr. Jenn: Time out is not effective at this age at all. I’m not a big fan of time outs as most people do them period. Time outs are not appropriate until kids get to what we call the “age of reason” which is about 3 ½ years old. So if you do it at this age with her, you’re just going to have: you putting her in the chair and her climbing out, you putting her back in the chair and her climbing back out- that teaches her nothing.
Me: Right! That’s how I feel.
Dr. Jenn: What your daughter needs in those moments is someone to teach her how to calm down. In the article that I wrote on time outs I talked about how to do a calm down time- you can call it a time out if you want. What you do is find a safe place for your child- whether it’s in your arms or in her bed with a toy- when she’s upset you can say “okay it’s time to calm down, let’s go to your special calm down spot. I’ll sit with you. Let’s work on calming down.” If you are able to do that with her, you’re teaching her how to self-soothe. Most people in this country don’t know how to self-soothe and that’s why they turn to drugs, alcohol, gambling and things like that. So if you can give her that skill, you’re giving her a special gift.
Me: Something you said in the book was: “Sometimes the impulse to do something overrides your child’s ability to stop themselves, even when we think they should know better.”
Dr. Jenn: At this age, your child shouldn’t be able to focus or concentrate, she should be all over the place. She’s not going to be able to stop her body- at 20 months? Not a chance! Her impulses are way bigger than her ability to restrain herself.
Me: It’s hard as a parent to realize that your child doesn’t know better, we expect them to know better and so we get frustrated.
Dr. Jenn: Yes, and we’re exhausted. Being a parent is exhausting. It’s wonderful and it’s beautiful, but it’s exhausting.
Stick around for Part Two of this interview with Dr. Jenn. If you are interested in reading about Dr. Jenn’s take on time outs, check out her article called Time Out on Time Outs!
In the meantime, you can head on over to her website or check out her amazing wealth of articles for more expert tips and tricks
About Dr. Jenn:
“Dr. Jenn Berman is a Marriage, Family and Child Therapist in private practice in Los Angeles. She has appeared as a psychological expert on hundreds of television shows including The Oprah Winfrey Show and The Tyra Banks Show and is a regular on The Today Show and The Early Show,. She currently hosts a call-in advice show on Sirius/XM’s Cosmo Radio. She is the author of the Los Angeles Times best selling book The A to Z Guide to Raising Happy Confident Kids which won the Mom’s Choice Award gold medal in parenting. She is also the author of SuperBaby: 12 Ways to Give Your Child a Head Start in the First 3 Years and the co-author of the children’s book Rockin’ Babies. Her “Dr. Jenn” parenting column is printed in Los Angeles Family Magazine and five other magazines every month and won the prestigious Parenting Publications of America award in parenting and child development. She is also on the Board of Advisors for Parents Magazine. Dr. Jenn has an eco-friendly clothing line for adults and children called Retail Therapy. All the tees have positive “feel good” messages and are made of organic and recycled materials. Dr. Jenn lives in Los Angeles with her husband and twin daughters.“
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