When Your Toddler Is a Tyrant

By Noelle Mering At several points in my younger parenting years I remember sitting, helpless and hamstrung, nursing a baby while watching my 3 or 4 or 5 year old behave badly. "Who will mother this child?!" I'd asked to the exactly zero other adults in the room. Clearly, a competent woman was needed, and I wasn't it. When exhausted and confronted with a child acting up, the last thing I needed was a complex parenting method. Behavior charts, graphs, spreadsheets were never simple enough for me. What I needed was a clear plan of action, so I distilled all the parenting wisdom I'd read, heard, and observed down to three basic, but effective concepts that I'd use to right the ship whenever a child was slipping into a pattern of misbehavior... Continue Reading