Ever wonder why your two-year-old refuses to eat a broken cookie and yet will happily chomp down on a broken crayon? Or how the food she was literally begging for yesterday suddenly ended up on her "most hated" list today? To find out what's behind these and other toddler mysteries, we turned to four experts who have done time in the toddler trenches: Jeffrey Derevensky, a professor in the department of psychiatry at McGill University; Mary Lou Vernon, a researcher and instructor in the department of psychology at the University of Western Ontario; Sara Dimerman, founder and director of the Parent Education Resource Centre in Thornhill, Ontario; and Cathy Kerr, an early childhood consultant with Community Living Toronto. In shedding light on these oh-so-baffling habits, our panel confirmed that most of them are perfectly normal and usually short-lived. Before you know it, your child will have embarked on a whole new round of thoroughly puzzling preschool behaviours.
Mystery #1 - Your toddler suddenly develops a strange, unexplained fear.
The toilet plunger at our house has only recently migrated back indoors. During the years when my youngest son, Ian, was a toddler, it lived in the garage. The reason? Ian was deathly afraid of plungers. (We only realized how afraid when he started kindergarten; while other kids were busy drawing people and houses, he painted toilet plungers!)
Such fears can be mystifying to the parent, but they generally make perfect sense to the child, says Derevensky. In Ian's case, there was a logical explanation - although we had to wait until he could talk before we got the scoop. Apparently, he'd walked into the family room one night when his older siblings were watching the episode of The Simpsons in which Homer gets a toilet plunger stuck to his head. Ian's conclusion: You're never truly safe while there's a plunger around. Banishing the object to the garage seemed a small price for having Ian end his bathroom boycott. (To heck with all his hard-earned toilet-training victories. He wasn't taking any chances.)
