Stop engaging the tantrum is what the literature says is the best practice. IIRC fMRIs show not that the mind (prefrontal cortex) is in a loop but that the prefrontal cortex is entirely shut down and the limbic system is highly active. Basically they are just having a tiny breakdown because whatever it is they are chanting about was the straw that broke the camel’s back in terms of how much challenge they can accept in a day. Luckily, the other side of it is a reset and they are back to 100% capacity. So just let it be and when the screams change from anger to sadness, hug it out and then move along as if it never happened.

It is we adults who are bothered by tantrums. Kids don’t even remember them. Because the memory parts of the brain are offline. We have a choice about whether we are bothered. We can choose not to be.

For what it is worth, I’m middle aged and in my youth we played Mario Brothers and, later, Super Mario Brothers on televisions. But then we went outside and played a neighborhood game we made up called Koopa, loosely based around the Mario Brother’s lore. We spent far more time outside and interacting with one another than inside in front of a screen. I don’t think our outdoor play was worse for it being based on a screen-delivered universe than if we’d made up a game based on a book-delivered universe.

I don’t think screens, themselves, are the problem. I think forcing children to be solo-, inside-cats is the problem. And screens are often times a tool of that force. By the time children are of a certain age, they start to prefer what they know, which is why parents will say that their children don’t want to go outside and play with whomever. For whatever reason, parents around me are entirely too obsessively worried about dangers to allow their children to have chance encounters and a good, directionless wander. When kids play only with playdates they have to be driven to but don’t know their neighboring children, we have a problem. A big problem. Because it means spontaneous door-knocking “Can Johnny come out and play” play cannot occur. So of course they’ll pick a screen over acknowledging their loneliness.

There are a few shows that are a yes for me:

• Bluey

• Daniel Tiger

etc

And we can always watch the movies that our children’s department at our local library does showings of. Last one we went to was Migration. Which is an Illumination film. But the librarians approved it and did a whole program surrounding it, and it was really funny for the adults in the audience, though that humor went right over the heads of the children.

As for social media – Raising him on using Line to connect with his far away grandmother and so far he views phones as … well … phones. Not game machines. Not weird asynchronous conversations via text and reposts. Just the ability to get a live person on the other end for voice chats and/or video. We’ll see how long we can ride this wave. But I’m pretty sure I’m going to insist on parental controls if ever there are social media accounts made. I read somewhere that families where the parents use parental controls have more open and educational dialogue about online dangers and comportment than families where that is not in place. And I want that dialogue!

He has started bouncing on the trampoline. On the way to jumping!

[Kid’s name], stop exercising and get down here and eat some cake!

Which they’ve now decided they don’t like any of the food we make even though it’s exactly the same stuff that would be at daycare.

Are you judging this based on dinner? Ask any pediatric dietician and they will tell you that toddlers and preschoolers are quite likely to skip dinner. It might not be the food but the fact that there is a meal at that hour which is the issue. The recommendation is to serve a full meal afternoon snack and then consider dinner a bonus meal if they even eat it at all.

Which then prolongs the cycle of not eating enough and needing night feeds and then not eating much because there was milk overnight. I feel like we have to cut the night feeds somehow but it feels really cruel to starve them when they’re used to it…

Trust your instincts. It is biologically normal for children to have one or two night feeds up until age 3. Though at some point you can start leaving “the offering” (a bowl of food you are comfortable cleaning up left in their room for them to eat from overnight without waking you, such as a bowl of cheerios).

The sleep is a little better but still not sleeping through the night

Unless you get extremely lucky, plan on your child not sleeping through the night until age 3. Instead, focus on teaching them what is appropriate for them to do by themselves when they wake in their room. You’ll sleep through the night and they will wake, play with some toys, and put themselves back to sleep and everyone will thrive and be happy.

As a long term nanny and now a parent myself, I’ve had exactly ONE charge out of 22 + my own child who can sleep 8 hours with no bottle. He stirs but puts himself back to sleep silently and if you aren’t watching a video monitor, you’d have no idea that he had stirred.

But if you ask The Mister about our own child, he’d swear our own kid sleeps twelve hours with no bottle and no stirring. That’s because THE MISTER sleeps twelve hours and wouldn’t hear a smoke alarm, much less the child stir. So I agree with you to consider the source and that it is very likely fantasy talk.

• most babies do their highest caloric intake at night because it is the lowest stimulation time. While it is possible to have them fast all night long, it isn’t in their best interests because their stomach has a fixed size and simply cannot hold enough calories to get them through the nightly brain growth without a meal. Can vs should. And also, that pediatrician needs to attend some continuing education.

• the fact that children sleep less well in the room with the parents is EXACTLY WHY roomsharing is recommended to prevent SIDS. Cannot die in deep sleep if you never get to deep sleep. Sleep apart at your own risk. And on that note, almost every single SIDS prevention tip is designed to give your child sh-tty sleep in order to prevent sleeping deeply because you cannot die in deep sleep if you never get to deep sleep; it is by design. Ask me sometime how I feel about that.

• sleep training doesn’t teach them that their bed is safe to sleep in. It teaches children that parents don’t want to hear them cry. There have been objective studies that find that children night wake the exact same amount whether sleep trained or not. Absolutely no difference whatsoever. But the sleep trained children wake silently. So this one is one where the benefit is to the child from having a well rested adult caregiver. But the child doesn’t learn anything from it other than to shut up.

It for sure counts as “sorting”. He’s put the two in the same category. Well done for his age and right on target.

I read in another comment that you are trying to avoid a mass shooting episode. Instead of changing schools, let’s change access to ammo and mental health services via laws and voting, restricting one and making the other universal and taxpayer supported. I think that would be more effective. It would keep children safe in schools, in churches, in movie theaters, at birthday parties, etc.

I think that children learn best in the environment that fits their brain the best. If that’s remote - awesome - but if not, I’ll fight a different way for my child’s safety in a physically in person school setting. And my child needs the accountability of the in person setting.

I work in childcare. I take care of the children, both mine and those of other parents. Summer is very busy for me.

My 11 month old drank from a water fountain. We expected him to play in it, but he leaned in like a school child who had been doing it all their life and pursed his lips and took a slurp.

Came to say this. Here, have my upvote.

And now, writing in two days later, he starts it on his own and giggles. So we are past that fear, apparently.

In my education, this was called The Charm Hold and is very useful for a gassy baby. Yet there are holds which are more useful for a gassy baby.

But you know what is most useful to make babies stop crying? Figure out what it is that they are communicating and act on it.

Sometimes you cannot figure it out because it is something like, “Dad, I need you to poke my left elbow five times while hopping on one foot,” and so they have to cry until something else more pressing comes along that makes their elbow poking irrelevant.

Editing to Add: If you want to stop babies from crying and aren’t going to do the figuring out bit, standing up and holding them vertically against you activates an old, old, old primate danger instinct where they will go silent so as not to attract the attention of the predator while the parent, whose fur their ancient instinct insists they are clinging to, makes the escape. Also, blowing in their face will get them to hold their breath momentarily, which has the side benefit of stopping crying. Cannot cry if you aren’t breathing.

Editing a Second time to Add: Even my own child instantly stopped crying for the pediatrician when he (pediatrician) held my newborn away from me. It has less to do with how the pediatrician held the baby, and more to do with the fact that the pediatrician wasn’t Momma or Dadda and my newborn’s sensory awareness of the world couldn’t locate Momma or Dadda. Danger! Ack! Better be silent to not attract predators while waiting for Momma or Dadda to come find me!

No, we don’t put barrel connectors into our mouths, especially not if they are electrified.

I felt the exact same way. Looking at my first child gave me hope for the future in a way I hadn’t, before. We’re going to be okay.

I finally perfected my cloth diaper poop dunk-n-swish technique to un-brown diapers while out on the go, so as not to have to spray so much in the evening when we get home. It took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out how to be effective at removing the brown solids from a cloth diaper with a dunk-n-swish.

He has figured out that not just dogs can crawl through the dog door, so can he.

Not one a child threw recently, but still by far my most favorite tantrum came when I was chatting with a young boy who I cared for about the very large salad bowl he had found in the kitchen and was playing with.

“It salad bowl,” he proudly said, and then as he attempted to fit inside of it he declared, “I salad.”

His older brother then came up and said, “You are not lettuce.”

The younger boy absolutely completely and totally lost it and melted all the way down, repeating the phrase, “Yes, lettuce. Am a lettuce.”

Of course we all ought to know that nothing about this meltdown was specifically due to the fact that the boy was not in fact a green leafy plant. It was due to the fact that he’d had it up to here with his brother trashing on his play and needed to release some of that irk.

How I handled it: I held space for his big feelings. I let him cry and fuss and kick and yell. So long as he wasn’t hurting himself or others, he needed to process the injustice done to him by his brother and he needed to feel the feelings caused by it. I made sure he was in a safe place and let him become a little adorable ball of emotions and waited for that change in cry, you know the one, where the anger changes to sadness. When we got there, I came over and gave voice to his feelings (“You felt undermined and invalidated. Your brother wasn’t invited into your play but he interrupted in order to destroy it, anyway. That made you mad.”) He came in for a hug, feeling seen and understood. I offered that I could help him come up with some ways to approach his brother about the situation if he wanted. He didn’t want. And so that was that. Within 5 minutes of the start of sad-cry, he was off on another game, this one trying (and failing) to levitate his hotwheels cars.

If you ignore that the intended audience of the book is a parent of an ADHD child, “Why Will No One Play With Me” (book) is a fabulous step-by-step primer that covers all the social and emotional skills one needs to succeed in the world as well as talks the reader (parent) through how to impart those lessons to a child who is good at analytical thinking. I wish there were a book written more broadly that is this good at preparing parents with more than just platitudes and broad goals.