2-Year-Old Just Doesn’t Understand
Q. Two days a week, my 2-year-old son attends a mother’s morning out program that includes children as young as 8 months. At present, he is the oldest child in his class. In the meantime, the problem is that he’s hurting some of the babies. Almost every time I pick him up, I get a report of an incident. The teachers have been very patient, but I can tell they’re slowly reaching the ends of their ropes. The other day, he hit a baby on the forehead with a toy and drew a little blood. What should I do?
A. You should cut this column out of the newspaper and show it to the teachers.
For the following reasons, toddlers and babies should not be grouped together in any sort of day-care situation:
Generally speaking, toddlers don’t “get it” where babies are concerned. They simply don’t understand that these little bundles of movement and sound are human beings. No amount of explanation, furthermore will turn on the light of understanding. The typical toddler is not old enough to understand that a baby is human, with feelings, until his or her cognitive (intellectual) skills are mature enough to grasp this concept, at which point the toddler in question is no longer a toddler.
Because they don’t “get it,” toddlers tend to relate to babies as if they were just another plaything. In their attempts to figure out what babies are, they poke, pinch, bite and maul (as they tend to do with dogs and cats). And lo and behold, they get a fascinating array of reactions — from both the infants and nearby adults.
Some toddlers, when reprimanded for something, will stop doing the something in question right away. Others, for whatever reasons, will continue doing the something in question no matter how many times they are reprimanded. The former category contains a disproportionate number of girls; the latter an equally disproportionate number of boys. Regardless, you can’t predict what’s going to happen if you mix a baby and a toddler of either gender.
Toddlers don’t know their strength and furthermore, don’t understand that the exploring and experimenting they do on babies are often hurtful. To take one example, they don’t know that lying across a baby’s face shuts off the baby’s air supply. In short, the potential risk requires that an adult be always present if not to prevent hurt (which isn’t always possible), then to at least intervene before the hurt becomes life threatening.
The same problem often arises in a family setting when one sibling is a toddler and another is an infant. As emergency room physicians and pediatricians will attest, the number of infants who are seriously injured by toddler siblings is not insignificant. This is one reason why most child development specialists say 3 to 4 years is the ideal interval between siblings.
In short, this problem has arisen because of misjudgment.
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The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = John Rosemond The Charlotte Observer