← Talking Toddlers
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Babies and toddlers are built to depend on the people who love them the most. Built to learn through us before they can learn any other way. That's not a flaw. That's the design on purpose from the start. And science didn't invent this sequence, it just found it generations later and wrote down what was already true. Here's the number I actually want you to keep in your mind.
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Hello and welcome to Talking Toddlers, where
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I share more than just tips and
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tricks on how to reduce tantrums or build your toddler's vocabulary. Our goal is to develop clarity, because in this modern world, it's truly overwhelming. This podcast is about empowering moms to know the difference between fact and fiction, and to never give up, to tap into everyday activities so your child stays on track. He's not falling behind, he's thriving. Through your guidance. We know that true learning starts at home. So let's get started.
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It's pickup time. You're standing in the doorway of his classroom, diaper bag on your shoulder, ready to grab him and go. Yet his teacher pulls you aside using the quiet voice, and you can tell this is serious. We just want to flag something, she says. He's been having a hard time sharing. He's grabbing toys from the other kids, sometimes pushing to get what he wants. Is anything going on at home that we should be aware of? You shake your head and then you nod. You thank her. Your stomach tightens just a bit, and in the car you play that conversation over and over again. That night you try it yourself, hand him a toy and then gently say, it's Mama's turn. Let Mama have a turn. And he shakes his head. He even pushes away, arches his back and you're shocked. And then you try again in the morning. Same thing. Or maybe your days don't look like drop off lines and teacher conferences and all of that. Maybe it's just a Tuesday morning morning play date at your friend's house. There are several toys spread across the living room floor, and while you're sharing coffee, your friend looks over at the kids and your son grabs a truck her son was just holding. You catch her tenseness. Her whole tone shifts. Her eyes lock in on her own kid and you wonder, is this genuine concern she has? Is she uncomfortable with me and my child? So both of you get up. You start walking toward them and your son bolts the second his friend reaches out and tries to grab the truck back. He clutches it to his chest and there's no way he's giving it up. So you call after him and he doesn't stop. Your face starts to get hot. Different rooms, different situations, but the same tightening in your stomach and the same question is forming in the back of your mind. You realize that you don't really want to ask this out loud. Is something wrong with him? Maybe it's you. But I assure you, after 40 years as a speech language pathologist working with hundreds and hundreds of toddlers and their beautif families raising them, I want to tell you that what that teacher didn't understand and what that other mom during this playdate situation probably doesn't understand either. Nothing is wrong with him. He is not behind. Nor is he being defiant or naughty. He's exactly where a 15 month old is supposed to be. There is a skill hiding under sharing that almost nobody names for you. And once you can see it, this whole situation looks completely different. Here's what happens when nobody hands you the true timeline. You start grading your toddler against a milestone that was never his to match. Yet every snatch or grab starts to feel like a character problem instead of a young child still very much under construction. And some part of you already knows this. You watched him grab that toy and some part of you thought he's just a baby. That instinct, it's spot on. The checklist and the misguided social expectations, they're the ones that are wrong. Turn taking and sharing get talked about like they're the same thing. I assure you they are not. And the difference between them explains almost everything you are struggling with at this point. Turn taking is rhythm. You roll the ball to him, he rolls it back, you turn the knob, and then he turns the knob. It's a beat, a call and a response. And underneath that beat is something your toddler can actually trust. The toy is coming back. He gives it up just for a split second, knowing that he's going to get it back. Sharing doesn't come with that promise. Sharing means giving something up with no guarantee you'll ever see it again. It could be for just a little while, or maybe for good. They don't know. They don't understand. Think about how that would feel for you as an adult. Say somebody asks you to hand over your car keys to to a complete stranger. No timeline, no promise you'll be getting them back in any specific time. Panicking a little wouldn't be an overreaction. It would be exactly the right response to real uncertainty. Now put that feeling inside a little baby body that hasn't developed a self yet. His self is not set Apart from what he's holding in his own hand. At this age, with a 1, 2 and 3 year old, a toy isn't just a toy, it's an extension of him. So when you ask your 2 year old to share, you're not asking him to be generous. He has no idea what that means. You're asking him to survive what feels to him like actual loss. Turn taking works because it never asks that. It offers something he can trust instead. A promise kept every single time. That's exactly why it has to come first. It's not a smaller version of sharing either. Please don't confuse those two. It's the practice that builds the trust sharing will eventually need. And there's one more piece underneath all of this. And it connects straight back to last week's episode in number 162. In that episode, remember I talked about joint attention? The moment he points at something and then he looks back at you just to check if you saw it too. That's not a separate skill, that's actually the seed. Joint attention is what first teaches your toddler. That you have a mind of your own, that you notice things, want things, feel things independent of him. Researchers call this fuller version theory of mind knowing that someone else's head or their mind holds a different picture than what the toddler does. Your toddler is just beginning to understand, to take another person's perspective. And he doesn't have to agree with that perspective, but he's beginning to see it from their point of view. But here's the key. It doesn't arrive all at once. It starts earlier with that look back. Somewhere between six months and one year of age, they begin noticing a face and following where you're pointing, where you're. And then somewhere between first birthday and third birthday, he starts to grasp that you want different things than he does, that you're separate from one another, but grasping it and tolerating it, those are two entirely different things. So please hear me when I say that right now, where you, as the parent of a toddler, it's still mostly about him. And that's not a flaw. That's exactly where he's supposed to be developmentally. The part where he can actually hold onto the idea that you have your own separate thoughts, your own separate beliefs. That doesn't reliably show up until somewhere around 4 or 5. And you heard me right here, 4 or 5. And here's something funny. I remember exactly when this idea entered my own training. It was way back in 1985. I was a graduate student, and autism wasn't really common on anybody's caseloads back then, so this whole theory of mind wasn't something that we spent a lot of time on. However, within the next 10 to 15 years, that changed. By the early 2000s, it was something more most clinicians understood pretty well, and I remember learning how to explain it to parents who came into my office and were part of my caseloads. One of the ways we would informally get to a read on their child and where they were in this whole developmental theory of mind, we would ask them whether your child could lie. Have you caught him in any kind of lie? And I know that sounds bizarre and the parents would often look at me, but let's think about this for a second. What does an actual lie require to tell you something untrue and have you believe it? In order for that to happen, he has to understand that what's in his head, in his mind, isn't automatically in yours. That you are only know what he shows you or tells you. He has to hold on to the truth, push it down, ignore it, and then hand you something else instead. All while trying to manage his own facial expression so he doesn't give himself away. As we all know, little kids have a hard time doing that. But all in all, this is no small trick and is really developmentally clever. Because in order to make that lie sound convincing that it's the same mental machinery we've been talking about in this episode, just showing kind of in different colors or in a different costume. If your 4 year old ever tells you he didn't eat the cookie and yet he has chocolate crumbs all over his chin, don't panic. Be a little proud. That's the same mind gymnastics that you've been waiting on this whole time is finally coming to fruition. He is taking on the whole theory of mind, taking on somebody else's perspective. He knows he shouldn't have eaten the cookie, so he's going to say what he thinks you want to hear. Let's bring it back into today's topic. This means every time a toy gets snatched or hoarded, when your child is 15 months or 2 years old, or even 3, you are not watching Defiance. You're watching a very young child being asked to perform a mental trick, his brain is years away from being able to do. That teacher in the doorway at the beginning of this episode and that mom on that playdate. Neither one was asking him to be better behaved, right? They were asking him to be much older than he actually is. This is the part that most people miss completely when we think about it. Rolling a ball, passing a block. Playing peekaboo or patty cake. Turning pages side by side through book sharing. Pushing a car across the floor and waiting for it to come back. Pouring water a little bit in your cup, a little bit in my cup. Passing the spoon at the table. No words in any of that. Just rhythm, a gesture, and someone showing up on the other side to receive it and keep it going. So last week I told you we would continue with this conversation about the necessary precursors, the steps that lead to your toddler using speech and language intentionally, fluently, and as an actual conversational partner, holding his own weight. This is one of those steps. It doesn't look like language yet when we're looking at turn taking, but it is. This is the order. Things we're always going to unfold in action before words, connection before language, nonverbal before verbal. That order isn't an accident. It's God's design. Babies and toddlers are built to depend on the people who love them the most. Built to learn through us before they can learn any other way. That's not a flaw. That's the design on purpose, from the start. And science didn't invent this sequence. It just found it generations later and wrote down what was already true. Here's the number I actually want you to keep in your mind. 12 to 18 months. Simple back and forth, starts with a ball or a block. Peekaboo short doesn't last long. A couple of trials. That is healthy, that is normal, that is development. This age needs your hands, not just your example, but for you to stay close, arms within reach, ready to guide his hand through the motion if he needs it. You're not standing back and watching and just letting the crumbs fall where they may. You're right there, hand over hand being the guide this stage of development actually calls for. And then when you move into 18 to 24 months, parallel play almost across the board. Blocks are built side by side, crayons side by side. They are not sharing, they're imitating. They're checking each other out. They're stealing glances at what the other one is doing. They're very curious and they want to be close to him or her, but they're not sharing. Real turn taking still needs heavy help from you. This is where you start giving him something specific, a taste of what it feels like to give something up for a split second and then get it back. Maybe you could even do a quick Trade. You take the yellow truck and I can have the green one. Beep, beep, beep, beep. Now we can switch. All of it is directed by you. He's nowhere close to running this on his own yet. And then when we move toward that second to third birthday, structured turn taking becomes possible. After his second birthday, that's where you could be stacking blocks or you could be sharing a puzzle. Alternating pushes down a ramp. All of those activities only with real structure underneath, though you still have to narrate what the expectations are. Sometimes you have to give warning. Some visible way that he or she knows when the turn begins and, and when the turn ends. You could say things like hold on, watch Joey go down the ramp and you have your hand out. Hold on. Yep, you get to go next. Wait, wait, wait. One, two, three. Okay, now it's your turn. Joey is down, it's safe. Your turn now. So possible is the key word there. It's not guaranteed, it's not automatic. But they're really beginning to understand and feel what waiting is like. This is where it takes some more finesse on your part. Practice at home always.
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Right?
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Maybe you have an older sibling or a very patient aunt, a cousin who won't take it personally. Use them beyond yourself. How this works outside of the family. Before you put him in a real play date and hope for the best, he needs practice. He needs to walk through it successfully with your guidance. So you're still also going to have to think about which kids could actually match up with him. Right. Temperament style. What time of the day would be better? Morning is always better than late afternoon. What activity? How long do these play dates last? Realistically, not an open ended day. Put a beginning and a middle and an end to it. All of it matters. You're not testing him, you're setting him up to actually learn through experience. And instead of setting him up and say, oh, good luck kid, you don't want those meltdowns, you don't want that struggle and strife. And then the next big age group is that 3 to 4 year old. This is where it starts running more or less on its own. And here's the number. Genuine sharing offered without being asked usually doesn't show up consistently until somewhere after the third birthday and actually closer rolling into that fourth birthday. Many kids, not all, will fall in this window. Some a little bit earlier, some a bit later. It depends on their life experience and learning through you. But even then, when you're looking at that three and a half and that four and a half year old. It can come and go. It's not a light switch. It's a slow developmental process, a slow build, and it should be allowed to look unfinished for years. So I put this whole timeline on a one page PDF handout for you. Every age, every stage laid out so you are not left guiding, guessing. The link is in the description down below. I want you to grab it, put it on your fridge, share it, talk it over with your partner or your mother or the babysitter. Stop counting on teachers who have a clipboard and a judgment, or on other moms who have a raised eyebrow and are kind of in the dark just as you are. Don't let others tell you where your child actually stands. You don't need to guess anymore. You have what it takes to set him up for this. You just needed a map and I got the map for you. And let's go back for a second because a couple of weeks ago, a couple of episodes, episode 161, I gave you the three P's that I have always used in working with my families. Present, purposeful and playful. This is where that goes. To work to be present, get down with them, be the other side of this exchange and this experience to be purposeful. Narrate it in simple language. My turn? Your turn. It's not a lecture, just naming what's happening, what the expectations are. And then to be playful. Keep it light hearted. Give waiting some, some shape, right? Some room to be felt. I highly recommend a visual timer. Mine here is a red visual clock. It's probably older than most of you who are listening. And if you go to Amazon these days, they come in all different colors and different sizes. I'll have that link down below too. But a red visual clock can just speak volumes to understanding what waiting feels like. Or you could even do it if you don't have one and you're out and about. You could sing something. I always sing row, row, row your boat. And I do three rounds, relatively crisp, takes about 30 seconds. And as you're singing, your child is feeling, feeling what it's like to wait his turn. Whatever you use, it has to be something that your child can see and feel. Not an abstract like, oh, you'll get a chance in a minute and then you turn your back, he's going to melt down. He doesn't understand any of that. But at the same time, you don't need structured lessons to teach turn taking. That can come later, say with board games. And we can certainly walk through that because that's one of my favorite topics. And we can do that at another time. But right now, when we're Talking about a 12 month, 18 month, 24 month old child, it's everyday life that actually will do the teaching for you and with you. So you don't need special toy time and structure. Not at this age. Use dishes. I wash this dish, you wash the next dish. You wash three dishes. I wash three dishes. Or you put things in the grocery cart. Or you take things out of the grocery cart. My turn. Your turn. You can add ingredients to a bowl. I put in one egg, you put in one egg. Pushing buttons to an elevator or opening the car door. All of it is just opportunity. Life is full of turns. Once you start pointing them out. And they'll feel like they're part of this life, this day when he snatches or won't let go of something that is not defiance. Please hear me on that. And that's not a character flaw either. It's an undeveloped skill, right on schedule, developmentally appropriate, healthy. So please don't punish a skill that hasn't grown in yet. Teach it, model it, nurture it. Give it years to blossom. That teacher in the beginning, in the doorway, wasn't wrong to notice something. However, she was wrong about what it meant. So your son didn't do anything wrong. And you didn't do anything wrong either. However, a system built to manage a room full of toddlers asked one 15 month old to perform a task that doesn't reliably show up until he's four. Then they flagged him for not having it yet. And this happens more and more than any of us want to admit. Researchers have actually tracked it for years. Preschoolers get suspended and expelled at rough three times the rate of kids in kindergarten through 12th grade. Three year olds removed from a classroom for being exactly three. It doesn't stop at the school door either. It could be at the playground. At a birthday party, a toddler grabs a toy once and twice and then all of a sudden he's the aggressive one. He is known as the bully. A label stuck on a kid who's doing exactly what a kid his age is built to do. And the mistake can run both directions, I assure you. So let's be fair. Sometimes it's a system or another parent jumping straight to judgment. And sometimes it's you as the mom who was never taught how to build this skill because nobody built it with you, right? So you're feeling like your child is wrong or a bully or just not nice or impatient or all boy Whatever label you end up putting on him. So both situations are very real, but both are fixable. Which is exactly why this turn taking topic is the practice ground underneath all of it. And that's why it matters for every child and every family. No matter which side of the situation you might find yourself standing, whether it's a school event or a dance class or a birthday party. And here's the thing, this is not rare. That's happening in many classrooms, in living rooms and playgrounds every day. I know because I've been standing in the middle of these battles and discussions and personal heartache more times than I care to count. Going back to the 1990s when I was a brand new clinician, I was building a practice there in Los Angeles. I remember the first calls as if they were yesterday. A mother on the phone telling me her toddler had already been expelled two or three times. I was stunned. These were established, high ranking, well regarded, expensive preschool programs. And they were failing these children over and over, exactly the way I just described to you. It took me years to learn how to navigate this. Sometimes we managed to get a particular child reinstated, and sometimes the only real option was finding somewhere else entirely. Neither path was easy, and my heart would break every time because you, the mom and the dad, had no idea what was actually happening. And in my experience, most of those school systems weren't especially interested in finding out. That was 30 years ago. And I'll tell you clear as day, it hasn't gotten any better. If anything, unfortunately, it's gotten worse. More children needing more from the adults around them. And systems that, whatever their intentions, rarely have the staff or the training or the bandwidth to give any one child what he actually needs. Not because they don't care per se, but because the structure was never built for the kind of individual patience this age requires. The patience God designed this remarkable fragile stretch of growth to be met with. Which is exactly why after 40 years of watching this play out, I've landed somewhere I never expected to land. And I stand here firmly. Keep your children home with you for as long as you possibly can. Do everything within your power to be the one teaching, guiding, and holding them through at least these first three years. You are the environment he was designed to learn inside of first. And nobody, no matter how well credentialed, can replace that. I know it can be challenging, and it's a very, very personal choice. My role here is to speak the truth, to share what I've learned over 40 years. You deserve all the facts and then you can make an informed decision. If you want the full sequence, what comes before words, step by step. Grab the guide. I made it just for you guys because I believe knowledge is power. You've got this. The link is down below, so please take it and use it and share it with every adult in your life. Next week, we'll sort through why some toddlers can settle in and focus, while others can't get there at all. It seems. And it has a lot less to do with willpower or personality than you'd think. So God bless and thanks for talking toddlers. I'll see you next week.