When Your Toddlers Start to Act Like Teens

By Alina Adams for Kveller

There is a saying that the way your kids were as toddlers is how they’ll be as teens. (Only bigger and louder and, in some places, with the legal right to drive.)

If that’s true, then we’re really in for some fun times over at my house.

When my oldest was a toddler, he didn’t talk much. But–Bad Mommy confession–we really didn’t notice until our pediatrician got a concerned look on her face and started asking questions while taking notes and measuring the size of his head (boy had a really big head. Literally off the charts big. He still does). I think the reason we didn’t notice his lack of verbiage (and no, not only because as our friends suggested, between my husband and I, the poor kid never had a chance to get a word in edgewise, ahem) was primarily because he never got frustrated at not being able to make himself understood. Whatever he wanted, he went ahead and got. He’d climb up on chairs or head-dive into his playpen to reach a toy. He’d open the refrigerator and retrieve a sippy cup of milk. When a television production job took me out of town for extended periods of time, he expressed his displeasure at my career choices by simply ignoring me on my days home. “Mommy? Who is this Mommy person of which you speak? I don’t see any Mommy.”

So, to extrapolate:

Independence = Good. Silent treatment = Less Good. Daredevil lack of need to ask for permission before embarking on less than wise courses of action? Something to be on the lookout for.

My middle son was a completely different child. (As I described in the blog on my kids’ names, we might as well have named him, “Not Adam,” as that was inevitably people’s response to him.) My middle son was chattering away in understandable sentences by the age of 1. Which meant he was ready, willing and able to argue. Anything. And if he found he couldn’t outtalk his foes (in the end, he was still 1 year old; we were a couple of decades ahead of him), he’d throw tantrums, complete with plates of food being flung on the floor, books and toys flying off shelves, and sheets ripped off the beds to be piled in a heap in the center of his room. (Ironically, experts will tell you that tantrums are for non-verbal children irritated at not being heard. Those experts do not live at my house.)

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