5 Phrases To Help Avoid Toddler Meltdowns

This article is published in full at Parent.co. You can read it in its entirety here.

I’m not a huge fan of offering unsolicited parenting advice. I’ve received enough of it myself to be wary of people’s intentions when they do offer it.

Are they judging? Criticizing? Honestly trying to help?

My hope is that, if you’re reading this, it’s because you’re curious to learn what’s worked for other parents who were aiming to raise kind, thinking, strong, and flourishing people. The internet can get a bad rap as a really easy place to find bad advice, but I think sometimes it can almost feel safer than asking in person: those who are looking for advice can find it, those who are not looking for it don’t have to be subjected to the unsolicited version of it.

What I write here is offered only as a “this is what has worked for me,” and perhaps each phrase will only be used for a season. What works at three years old may not work at four or five. I think the best thing for parents to remember is that we usually know our kids better than any other adult on the planet. We know when things work, we know when they’ll fall apart.

There has never been a silver bullet for parenting, and there never will be. That’s what makes it so hard. It’s also what makes it so beautiful – we grow so much more when we are forced to dive deep into knowing our individual children well.

That said, here are the phrases that have helped us.

1 | “We are problem-solvers, not whiners.”
My husband is an engineer – a perpetual problem solver, if you will. As his spouse, it’s both a blessing and a curse; he loves to solve problems, but he also loves to solve problems. As one who loves to work through the process, sometimes I have to remind him that I’m not looking for a cut and dry solution right now. The strength? I can usually present him with the situation when I have a particular problem and expect that he won’t give up on it until it’s resolved.

As a dad, he’s found this phrase to also be helpful with our three-year-old, who is (I hope) at the peak of the whiny years. When we hear her voice creep ever so slightly into the whiny range, we remind her of our goal: “We are problem-solvers, not whiners.” Most of the time, this helps her re-orient to a frame of mind in which she’s focused on figuring out what the problem is that led her to want to whine. Then we can move on to fixing that problem, or working past it.

I’m waiting for the day when this phrase eventually backfires and she responds with, “I’m a whiner!” but for now it’s working...

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