Why responding with empathy is best for your toddler, and good for you too

Toddlers usually dial up quite a lot

Caring for a toddler can be exhausting! Your busy little person will have a voracious hunger for rich and changing sensory motor experience, and relies upon you to surround her with an interesting environment. This is often difficult to do for long inside our homes.

There will be many times, perhaps even in a day, when your toddler dials up in frustration because you, as a parent, are unable to allow certain explorations or experiences (like running onto a road, or poking a baby in the eye, or snatching a little friend’s toy, or putting a hand on the stove-top). Or your toddler will have a desire that you are unable to meet, often driven by the powerful biological drive to explore everything through his senses.

• When you are at home, try to keep the environment toddler-friendly, so that you are not constantly battling your little one’s exploring fingers. Unfortunately that means living for a year or two in a home where nothing dangerous or fragile is able to be reached by your child. There will come a time when you are able put breakable things back on the coffee table – but not for a while.

• When you do need to protect your toddler from an exploration or situation that poses danger, do so by physically by picking her up and taking her away from the object or environment of concern. Our little ones need bodily interventions which remove them from the concerning situation into permissible experiences, much more than they need than explanatory words. This is how they learn – through the body.

Frequent dialling up of your toddler’s sympathetic nervous system is inevitable, although changing the environment around you to allow for lots of rich sensory motor adventure, and to minimise the impermissible, really helps make the days and evenings more dialled down, which is good for your little one, and good for you.

It's much better to control your environment and make it more suitable, than to feel you have to be constantly trying to control your little one's behaviours which are arising from his powerful and health-giving biological drive for rich and changing sensory motor experience.

How can you best manage your toddler's behaviours and feelings?

You'll experiment your way through. You'll have your own unique style of parenting, which is also likely to change over time.

But trying to understand and connect with your toddler's own mysterious little heart and inner world (which makes perfect sense to him), even as you teach him, protect him, and shape his behaviour, is best for your toddler's mental and emotional development.

• A pattern of emotionally-connected responses over time acknowledges the dignity of your little one’s feelings of hurt and frustration and the power of his biological drives, in particular for sensory motor adventure - even as you do what a responsible parent needs to do. You are communicating, whether by actions or words (which might be very low key): "I know this doesn't make sense to you, sweetheart, but my job is to teach you and protect you.”

• I don't mean that we need to worrying and responding sensitively to every little communication from our toddlers! As parents, we don't always respond. Sometimes we respond but not particularly quickly. (This is often the case when caring for other children too.) Being ignored at times is an inevitable part of family life. In those moments, your little one is learning that others matter too. Nevertheless, an overall pattern of responsiveness from parents and carers in these early years is important for your toddler's emotional and mental health life-long.

• Staying heart-connected also doesn’t mean that we have to overuse words. Having said that, your parenting style will fit your own personality, and will be different to everyone else's. Some parents are just naturally talkative! There's no such thing as perfect parenting, only your kind of parenting.

What can you do when your toddler doesn't communicate as much as others?

This might just be your little one's personality. Some young children are less likely to initiate communication.

But sometimes our little ones who communicate less actually have higher levels of sympathetic nervous system activity. That is, their stress response is dialled up high even though they seem to be placid, and aren't showing it in words or behaviours. There are many unknowns around these little ones who are less naturally socially communicative.

The toddler who doesn't initiate communications as much definitely requires extra attention and back and forth communications with you or with their loving carers, not just with speech but with lots of interactive physical contact and play and enjoyment, to support their social and motor development.

Toddlers thrive best in a language-rich environment. Our little ones who initiate communication less require special protection against much screen time.

If you have concerns that your toddler doesn't communicate as much as other children, or you have concerns about your toddler's motor, social or language development, it's important to talk this over with your GP.

Recommended resources

How to nurture the flourishing of your baby's or toddler's brain

I recommend the program Tuning into Toddlers Online (TOTOL), by Professor Sophie Havighurst and her team at Mindful, The University of Melbourne, Australia, if you're interested in learning more about shaping your toddler's behaviours in a way that keeps emotional connection strong. You can find out more here.

Selected references

Brusche ME, Haag DG, Melhuish EC. Screen time and parent-child talk when children are aged 12-36 months. JAMA Pediatrics. 2024;178(4):369-375.

Gottman JM, Katz IF, Hooven C. Parental meta-emotion philosophy and the emotional life of families: theoretical models and preliminary data. Journal of Family Psychology. 1996;10:243-268.

Havighurst SS, Kehoe CE, Harley AE. Tuning in to Toddlers: Research protocol and recruitment for evaluation of an emotion socialization program for parents of toddlers. Frontiers in Psychology. 2019;10(1054):doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.01054.

Havighurst SS, Kehoe CE, Harley AE, Thomas R. A randomized controlled trial of an emotion socialization parenting program and its impact on parenting, children’s behavior and parent and child stress cortisol: Tuning in to Toddlers. Behavior Research and Therapy. 2022;149:104016.

Johnson AM, Hawes DJ, Eisenberg N. Emotion socialization and child conduct problems: a comprehensive review and meta-analysis. Clinical Psychology Review. 2017;54:65-80.