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Listening Skills in Toddlers
6 Surprising Ways to Get Your Toddler to Listen
By Amy Henry
Toys are scattered the length of the living room, but your toddler wants to play outside, not stay inside to clean up. The bathtub beckons, but your toddler wants stories, not suds. And when you're late for work, your toddler goes on sit-down strike and refuses to get in the car.
How on earth do you get a toddler to listen?
"It's not possible to engage toddlers in cooperation except through distraction and redirection," says Jane Nelsen, a South Jordan, Utah, marriage, family and child therapist, and co-author of the Positive Discipline series. The toddler brain simply cannot think or respond in the way many parents assume it can, she says.
Dr. Jerry Wyckoff, a child psychologist in Prairie Village, Kan., and co-author of numerous parenting books including Getting Your Child from No to Yes (Meadowbrook Press, 2004), agrees. "Toddlers aren't little adults. They're incredibly self-centered. 'It's all about me.' They can't developmentally put themselves in someone else's shoes." This means you have to put yourself in your child's shoes and develop a few irresistible, kid-friendly strategies to grab her attention.
Toddlers lack a view of the big picture. "They get totally immersed in what they're doing," Dr. Wyckoff says. So join them in that moment.
For Ed Murphy, an educational and editorial consultant from Leverett, Mass., and father of two, that meant singing and dancing his way into his little ones' consciousness. "When the playroom was knee-deep in Duplos, I'd start singing, 'Now we pick up the red Duplos,'" he says.
Big body movements are important, Murphy says. "I'd wave my arms and dance around," he says. "I gave it kind of a reggae beat." His son and daughter, now young adults, still fondly recall Dad's crazy song-and-dance routines. And the Duplos got picked up.