Recipe for disaster

Yesterday I had one of my worst parenting days, ever. Despite my best efforts at gentle parenting, that quickly went out the window when - for the tenth time - I had to pull Edward away from climbing chairs, pulling down cups, opening the freezer and so forth. Instead of staying cool and calm I ended up, ashamedly, shouting at Edward.

I think the key thing to remember is that toddlers are more likely to misbehave if they are tired, bored or hungry. Yesterday I made the mistake of spending too long in the kitchen and in hindsight I can see that Edward was bored. He must have quickly sussed out that the best way to get my attention was to be touch naughty things and yes it worked. As Dr. William Sears says in The Good Behavior Book, "The bored child with a busy parent is a high-risk mismatch". Well this was certainly true in our case.

So how should I avoid my meltdowns? If I must get a task done during the day, a very short period of TV seems to do the trick, or if it's a huge task maybe asking a relative or friend to watch Edward for a while, we could even take it in turns. Either way asking my 19 month old son to entertain himself is way beyond his capacity at the moment, and is definitely a recipe for disaster.