Here are the areas I’ve found important for managing life together. This is maybe more useful to new parents or non-parents than to people who’ve already developed their own methods. There’s overlap with previous writing like Parenting philosophy and Investing in boundaries with young kids.
Physical basics
I mean things that affect mood and behavior, rather than the child’s more general physical health and safety (which I’m not trying to fit into this post).
Alcoholics Anonymous advises adults, when facing the urge to drink, to HALT and consider if they’re Hungry, Angry, Lonely, or Tired. This also identifies some of the factors that make children not their best selves.
Don’t get too hungry
Hungry children and adults will be cranky. If a meal is going to be later than usual, get a snack in beforehand. Otherwise you end up in a zone where any small disappointment leads to a meltdown and further delays eating.
If kids aren’t feeling well enough to eat usual food, fruit helps get them some sugar and hydration that will improve their mood.
Sleep
There’s lots of writing about sleep in the early years. It’s genuinely hard to figure out with babies. There are different methods that fit different needs and preferences.
I think society undervalues sleep past the baby stage. Emily Oster’s The Family Firm has data about the continued importance of sleep in middle and late childhood.
We prolonged naps (or quiet time in your room with audiobooks or podcasts) until around age 5. Jeff grew up with a mother who often worked nights, and quiet time was enforced even longer in his childhood so she could get a nap. This means an adult needs to be home in the afternoons, but usually we’re grateful for the chance to do something quiet while our youngest rests.
Many adults are also chronically underslept. Jeff wrote about our approach to prioritizing parental sleep. You’ll probably be more patient if you cut other activities but get more sleep. (My impression is that for a lot of people, TV trades off against sleep.)
Physical play and motion
Especially when we have more kids around (e.g. our kids plus cousins), things reliably get screamy if they haven’t had outside play. Get kids outside to do some physical play.
Some kids have more need for specific kinds of motion or sensory input (spinning, crashing into people or things, etc). There’s various advice for these things from occupational therapy websites. When one of our kids was chewing on stuff a lot at age 6, various items designed for chewing on were helpful.
Physical contact
Physical contact doesn’t necessarily have immediate effects, but I think it’s pretty likely it overall improves bonds between family.
Some ways we continue having physical contact as they get older:
- When reading or watching a video, sitting with them on our laps or sitting with an arm around them.
- Currently we’re doing “silly time” as a reward for our younger kids if they get ready for bed promptly, with tickles or flying them on our knees like an airplane.
- I have a game with my eight-year-old where I hug her and swing her like a pendulum, chanting “tick tock goes the clock.” She takes me up on the offer to “be a pendulum” where I think she would reject a long hug.
- While talking about something, sitting down on the floor or a sofa and offering the option of them sitting next to me or on my lap
- I’ve continued breastfeeding into the toddler age, longer than is typical in the US, largely because my kids really liked it as a kind of cuddling+. There are lots of things that influence whether and how long to breastfeed, but if it’s working for you and your kid, continue as long as you want.
But sometimes going for physical contact will make the dynamic worse, if the child is feeling prickly.
Breathing
Learning to slow down your breathing when you’re upset is certainly useful for a lot of adults, including me. I haven’t had much success in teaching the kids this. I’ll keep trying as they get older, though.
Change of scene / change of physical activity
- Take a crying baby/toddler to a different room or outside (works if they’re hurt / overwhelmed; unlikely to work with an angry toddler)
- I suspect breastfeeding helps calm down babies and toddlers partly because because you physically can’t drink and cry at the same time
- Jeff’s example of inviting the child to walk into another room and look at items
- When our older kids are upset or angry, they often retreat to their bedrooms. We don’t make them come out; if there’s something important to convey (an apology, a notification that we’re going outside) we say it through the bedroom door.
Emotions
How to Talk so Kids Will Listen and Listen so Kids Will Talk has some solid advice here. In short: treat kids’ emotions as real and valid, and acknowledge the emotions. (This doesn’t mean you get what you want; it’s fine to feel sad that your friend doesn’t want to play, but she also doesn’t have to play with you.) A summary.
When I’m feeling sad and worried, I mostly try not to express it to my kids. (I don’t want to put on a totally false front, but “opposite action” / “fake it til you make it” is actually pretty good for negative moods in my case.) If I am expressing it, I try to be clear with them what’s going on: “I’m having a sad day,” “I’m feeling worried about something at work.” This helps make clear that the problem isn’t them.
When my kid is being unreasonable, saying “I’m frustrated” often reaches them in a way that focusing first on their behavior doesn’t, and keeps me from some worse outburst. (Nonviolent communication would call this an “I” statement)
I apologize when I’ve been unreasonable or lost my temper with them.
Behavior
I get a lot of value from behavioralism. Kazin’s Everyday Parenting Toolkit is one good guide. Don’t Shoot the Dog introduces a lot of the concepts but is less practical in applying it to children rather than animals.
Even if you don’t prefer a behavioralist method for encouraging behavior you do want, an awareness of it helps recognize when you’re accidentally encouraging behavior you don’t want. If you don’t want your child to yell “I WANT MILK”, don’t bring them the glass of milk when they do it. Bring it only once they say “Milk please” – you can prompt them.
The behaviorist consensus seems to be that punishment is of pretty limited use, and most of what you want to use is reinforcement of good behavior (largely by your smiles, praise, and physical affection rather than material rewards). Even if there are few instances where they do what you want, “catch them being good” and praise it.
Timeout worked well for us as a discipline go-to. We used basically the 1-2-3 Magic method (here one summary). It’s not just for the kids; I think it helped me have more control over myself when I otherwise would have been physically rough with the kids. Much of the criticism of the method is about timeout applied badly. It can be short: one minute per year of the child’s age, but we cap at about three minutes even for the older kids. It mostly interrupts whatever was just going on.
The “do-over” is a useful tool when one or both of you is unhappy about how an interaction just went:
- I lift my toddler onto her chair for dinner. She freaks out: “I wanted to do it MYSELF!” I propose: “Should we have a do-over?” She nods, I lift her down, she climbs up herself.
- Older child whines “I wanted icccccce!” after I bring her water. Me: “Try that again without whining.”
- Example with older child, another example
Consistency and picking your battles
Jeff has written about parenting predictably.
We try to only set boundaries we’re going to enforce. We give the kids warnings when we’re getting ready to leave somewhere, but “It’s time to go now” means “I’m literally leaving the park” rather than “I’m going to look huffily at my phone while you continue playing for another 7 minutes until I yell at you.”
See also: Tool: is this causing a problem? If it’s not, let it slide.
Talk less
I try not to be in a position where I’m repeating things and the kids are ignoring me. Either they make some argument against what I just said, and I agree that they don’t have to do it, or I make it harder to ignore me. (If they’re really not processing what you’re saying, maybe there’s an auditory processing problem, which might need different strategies.) I don’t want to tell them to do stuff that I’m not prepared to enforce, which means I make fewer requests/demands of them.
From Bryan Caplan’s 10 more things I learned in my first 10 years of parenting: “Do not give your kids a good reason to ignore you by being a repetitive windbag.”
Not talking : Adult attention, even a lecture, can reinforce whining and fussing. I often think ignoring it is more effective. More on “active ignoring“
Timers / alarms: This can sometimes replace parental nagging.
Short maxims: Early on for some safety things, Jeff and I developed short catchphrases that we used a lot (“Hold hands in the street”, “No plastic bags on heads.” At least once we’d give a longer explanation, to be sure the child understands the reason for the rule, but we don’t give the explanation every time. A twenty-month-old won’t develop full empathy for a cat’s experience from “how would you like it if someone did that to you” lectures, but it is realistic for them to mostly obey the maxim “Tails are no.”
There are other times you can explain concepts like “Plastic bags across your face can make it so you can’t breathe, and if you can’t breathe you will die” and “It hurts the cat when you pull her tail.” But for young kids I think they’re best done at another time, even a few minutes later, not when feelings are high.
One we still use a lot, when our older kids are roughhousing:
“You’re playing a rough game, and you might get hurt.” When someone inevitably gets bonked in the nose, they are welcome to have a hug and “You were playing a rough game,” but no lecture and no punishment for the other kid.
Realistic expectations
Some of the struggles I see families having, especially if the parents don’t have much experience with other children, seem to result from unrealistic expectations for children’s behavior at a given age. Especially around expecting toddlers to be quiet and still, or to be patient during long stretches of adult activities like running errands.
On the other hand, I don’t want to have overly low standards (if my kid isn’t reading by some age, is there a learning disability that needs help?)
Your child’s medical provider, childcare provider, or teacher can probably give an opinion about whether a given behavior or ability is typical for that age. A lot of grandparents seem pretty rusty, and don’t necessarily have realistic standards.
In questions of serious danger, having realistic expectations means that we don’t allow some activities at all. A sibling who’s 98% reliable at holding the baby without dropping them isn’t allowed to hold the baby while standing up. A child who looks both ways before crossing 95% of the time isn’t allowed to cross streets on their own yet.
Plan fewer activities that are hard with kids
A big benefit of in-home care (first au pairs and later nannies) for us was not needing to get young kids out the door at a certain time to get to daycare. It’s not in the nature of kids to put on their shoes and leave on an adult timeframe. This is one of the areas where money can buy less stress, but of course that’s not always viable. We got by without a car for years but I don’t miss the days of trying to get a baby and a two-year-old to the bus stop on time.
Often when I’m frustrated with the kids it’s because I’ve planned something more ambitious than we had time for. A walk at toddler speed with no particular destination might be more fun than trying to get to a particular destination and back in a particular timeframe.
Bryan Caplan again: “Reduce the ambition of your family vacations until you have zero desire to scream at your kids or your spouse.”
Waiting it out
Often I wonder whether to try to change a behavior, or wait it out. Our three-year-old will eventually climb up stairs in a timely way, as she develops and is less interested in specks of dust and the lightswitch. If it’s a real problem (e.g. a safety problem, it’s driving other people crazy) it’s worth trying to change the behavior now. Other times I think we’ll all be happier if we just wait for brain development to take its course, and work around the situation in the meantime.
All the parenting books promise to improve things, but don’t expect a miracle. A good goal is getting problems to a manageable level, but not that children will always behave as you want them to.