Rebel, rebel! Is your toddler suddenly going against every request you make? Does the following statement sound all too familiar? "Jenna rebels about absolutely everything...and she doesn’t necessarily have a tantrum as such: sometimes she even appears to be listening to what I’m saying, but then she’ll just go off and do exactly what she was going to do anyway."
Junior Magazine's July article Rebel Toddlers by Rachel Ragg discusses our toddler's need to test boundaries and limits.
Ragg examines a new breed of toddlers -- they don’t throw tantrums, but they won’t do what you ask either. Is this due to overindulgence or are our kids just getting too smart for their own good?
Psychologist Mallory Henson believes it’s merely a development stage that a child must simply go through. If it sounds like teenage behavior, we’re not surprised since Henson believes that this toddler behavior is likely to rear its head again, once our little ones are teenagers.
Child psychologist Simon Cusworth, on the other hand, thinks children are born more rebellious due to physiological reasons. Apparently, if your child has a hypersensitive amygdala (the part of the brain which controls emotional responses) their rebellion is simply a manifestation of that.
Should we just shrug it off and accept their rebellious nature and know it is fleeting or try to change their ways now before it’s too late?
© 2009 Apartment Therapy
A "new breed of toddler?" Come on. I've got a toddler of my own, an enormous extended family that is always chock full of toddlers, and I babysat all through junior high and high school. Some toddlers throw tantrums. Some nod yes then do what they want. Some play deaf. It's all just variations on the eternal theme: you can't make me. Of course, yes I can. But they don't make it easy. I think this has been true since time began. "New breed of toddler" is just junk journalism.
view cmcinnyc's profile
This phase used to be called the Terrible Twos, when kiddo learned the meaning of "no" and felt called upon to practice it constantly.
Common wisdom used to be that this was a necessary development stage in baby's progress toward forming an identity separate from the parents. This might come from Erickson, but I learned it as a teenage babysitter so I don't really remember.
There's a sign of how birth rates have dropped among the educated middle-class... that this piece of cultural knowledge has been so thoroughly lost that magazines can talk about a "new breed of toddler" that says no.
view wende in the twin cities's profile
I totally agree with both of you. This isn't anything new; children need to test limits and boundaries -- that's how they grow. But there's always this need for the public to label EVERYTHING. When I first read this article I thought, "Yeah, right..."
The only way a new breed of toddler could exist was if there were kids with six legs and three eyes.
view Alex's profile
Super toddler: six legs, six arms, three eyes. Sees everything, gets into everything, moves at lightning speed to escape!
view wende in the twin cities's profile
The article doesn't actually say this is new, just that this kind of non-tantrumy rebellion is different from the traditional idea of the terrible twos: "But then there’s an entirely different breed of toddler: the Rebel Toddler."
I agree with Wendy's point: a lot of people seem to have lost touch with the fact that kids have always had pretty varied behaviour, regardless of all the age-related stereotypes. My toddler is a lot like I was at his age (I'm told). He's pretty easygoing and tractable, but when he really wants to do something, he just quietly goes ahead and does it, and he's pretty impervious to every form of dissuasion.
view TammyE's profile