Lifestyle
‘Why does my toddler … ?’ Your kiddo’s most confounding behavior, decoded
Parenting a two year old is such a wild ride. The other day, my son started the morning with an explosion of cuddles, followed immediately by refusing the blueberry muffins he had declared his very favorite the week before. Once we made it through breakfast, the daily Battle of Putting on Shoes was still ahead!
Sometimes, I feel like I’m playing a game of emotional ping pong with my kid. And that can be hard for both me and him to manage.
Fast-changing feelings and defiant behavior are developmentally appropriate for one to three year olds, says pediatric psychologist Roger Harrison. They’re a way of building your kid’s sense of self — and understanding their place in the world.
But for parents, they can often be a source of frustration, he says. When tantrums and power struggles arise from those emotions, it can be easy for us adults to lose our patience.
Reframing your toddler’s boundary-pushing as a means of social and emotional learning might offer some relief, says Harrison, a division chief within the department of child and adolescent psychiatry at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.
“When we understand the ‘why’ of certain behaviors and place them within an appropriate developmental context, it allows parents to step back from the emotion and address the behavior strategically,” he says.
Harrison and other child development experts answer questions about common toddler behaviors — and offer advice on how to respond in the situation.
Why does my toddler … say “NO!” to everything, even to things they like?
A toddler’s contrarian nature is just par for the course at this stage of development, says Harrison. In addition to developing more language and cognitive and motor skills at lightning speed, they’re just beginning to understand that they are their own unique person separate from their caregivers. With this new awareness comes a need to test boundaries in order to establish independence.
“Part of that process of figuring out who I am is to learn me in opposition to all the things in the world,” he says.
So if your toddler gives you a resounding “NO!” to his favorite popsicle or book before bedtime, what he might be actually doing is trying to flex his newly discovered self-awareness. His “no” could translate to, “Check this out, Mommy! I’m a person with my own mind and opinions now!”
⭐ Parent tip: What should you do if you need your child to say “yes” to, say, brushing their teeth, getting in their car seat or leaving the playground?
Model a calm response, then kindly but firmly let them know what’s going to happen next, says Jamie Glowacki, a parenting and potty training coach and the author of Oh Crap! I Have a Toddler. You might say: Yes, we do need to leave the playground. You can either go down the slide one more time and walk out with me, or I can carry you out right now.
Why does my toddler … say everything is “mine”?
In Toddlerland, “the rules of ownership are different,” Harrison says. “If it’s mine, it’s mine. If it’s yours and I want it, it’s also mine.”
As a child starts to build their identity and independence, they’ll often try to exert control over their environment through possession, Harrison says. It helps them understand themselves and their attachments in the world.
For example: my mom has black hair, so I have black hair. My sister has a cool toy, so I have a cool toy. I am a kid with black hair and a cool toy! Mine, mine, mine! By making claims like these, a toddler can test the boundaries of their environment to better define who they are.
So if your toddler claims every book in the library is hers or refuses to share even her least favorite stuffie on her playdate — don’t stress, says Harrison. She’s not being selfish, she’s just stretching out that newfound sense of self.
⭐ Parent tip: If you want your kid to share, model then practice the behavior, says early childhood educator Chazz Lewis. For example, in the aftermath of a toy dispute with another child on the playground, teach your toddler to ask for a turn by reaching your palm out assertively and saying, “turn, please,” he says. Do a few practice rounds before sending them back out to play.
Why does my toddler … want to lick/smash/crash into everything?
Does your little one love to spill every container they can get their hands on, lick colorful wallpaper or bounce against your living room like it’s a life-size pinball machine?
They may simply be trying to gain some sensory information about their surroundings, says Layne Deyling Cherland, a longtime preschool teacher-turned-content creator who focuses on adult-toddler dynamics.
To them, every action and interaction is a chance to gather more data about themselves and how things work. “What’s me and what’s not me? What effect do I have on the world? That’s what all this experimenting is,” says Deyling Cherland.
They may also be craving proprioceptive input, like the deep pressure gained from tight hugs or the strength-building from climbing on playground equipment, she says.
Toddlers crave these types of sensory experiences in part because it builds up their internal sense of position and movement, which is important for coordination, balance and even self-regulation.
⭐ Parent tip: As long as she’s safe, let your little one explore, says Deyling Cherland. Embracing weirdness or silliness can be an opportunity for connection and a key to disrupting power struggles.
Make an obstacle course with pillows and stuffies to get those zoomies out, then race through it together. Dole out some new or favorite snacks into separate bowls and have your picky eater play a game of blind taste-testing.
Why does my toddler … keep doing that thing I told them not to do 100 times?
No running in the kitchen! I said, don’t run in the kitchen! You have 10 seconds to stop running in the kitchen or you’re in big trouble, missy!
If you’re repeating yourself a bunch with your toddler, you’ve likely already lost control of the situation, says Glowacki.
From a comprehension standpoint, your average toddler doesn’t yet grasp the concept of negation, Lewis says. So when you say don’t run in the kitchen, what your child is more likely to understand from that sentence is: run in the kitchen.
More importantly, simply telling a kid what you don’t want them to do doesn’t give them any tools for how to behave successfully in the future, he says.
⭐ Parent tip: Instead of telling your toddler what they’re doing wrong, teach them how to solve the problem or what they should do instead, says Lewis. If you want your kid to stop running in the kitchen, you might say, “walk slowly in the kitchen.” Or maybe, “please walk slowly and gently on the tile floor so you don’t hurt yourself.”
“Now, there’s a chance they might actually do something different this time,” Lewis says.
Why does my toddler … hate switching activities?
Wake up! Change clothes! Eat breakfast! Toddlers are bossed around all day long, often with little understanding and even less say in their daily schedule.
While toddlers thrive on routine and consistency, transitioning from one task to another can be frustrating, Glowacki says. The break in continuity can be unsettling, especially when they’re immersed in an activity that gives them a sense of comfort and independence, like playtime or bath time. Those moments are also one of the very few pieces of the world she can exert any agency over, so that loss of control can feel acute.
Add to that hunger, sleepiness, overstimulation — daily factors that would stress out any other human — and those transition periods can become triggers for volatile emotions and tantrums, she says.
⭐ Parent tip: The next time your little one throws a fit about transitioning from playtime to dinnertime, try to remember that the change is huge for her, says Glowacki.
Put a little power back into her hands by offering two positive choices, Lewis says. For example: Blue plate or purple plate? Juice or milk? This gives her agency but allows you to safely steer her where she needs to go.
“The goal of toddlerhood is to give a child manageable pieces of personal power to practice with,” Deyling Cherland says. “We want them to have practiced enough so that when they are this young adult going out into the world, they know, ‘This is how I make decisions. My decisions do affect other people.’ “
The digital story was edited by Malaka Gharib, with art direction by Beck Harlan. We’d love to hear from you. Leave us a voicemail at 202-216-9823, or email us at LifeKit@npr.org.
Listen to Life Kit on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, or sign up for our newsletter. Follow us on Instagram: @nprlifekit.
On-air challenge
Today I’ve brought a game of ‘Categories’ based on the word “party.” For each category I give, you tell me something in it starting with each of the letters, P-A-R-T-Y. For example, if the category were “Four-Letter Boys’ Names” you might say Paul, Adam, Ross, Tony, and Yuri. Any answer that works is OK, and you can give answers in any order.
1. Colors
2. Major League Baseball Teams
3. Foreign Rivers
4. Foods for a Thanksgiving Meal
Last week’s challenge
I was at a library. On the shelf was a volume whose spine said “OUT TO SEA.” When I opened the volume, I found the contents has nothing to do with sailing or the sea in any sense. It wasn’t a book of fiction either. What was in the volume?
Challenge answer
It was a volume of an encyclopedia with entries from OUT- to SEA-.
Winner
Mark Karp of Marlboro Township, N.J.
This week’s challenge
This week’s challenge comes from Joseph Young, of St. Cloud, Minn. Think of a two-syllable word in four letters. Add two letters in front and one letter behind to make a one-syllable word in seven letters. What words are these?
If you know the answer to the challenge, submit it below by Wednesday, December 31 at 3 p.m. ET. Listeners whose answers are selected win a chance to play the on-air puzzle.
“I’m his wife,” I said to the on-call doctor, asserting my place in the cramped exam room. It was a label I’d only recently acquired. A year ago, it had seemed silly to obtain government proof of what we’d known to be true for six years: We were life partners. Now I was so grateful we signed that piece of paper.
Earlier that morning, I’d driven my husband to an ER in Torrance for what we’d assumed was a nasty flu or its annoying bacterial equivalent. We’d imagined a round of industrial-grade antibiotics, and then heading home in time for our 3-year-old’s usual bath-time routine.
But the doctor’s face was serious. Machines beeped and whirred as my husband laid on the hospital bed. Whatever supernatural power colloquially known as a “gut feeling” flat-lined in my stomach.
“It’s leukemia,” she said, putting a clinical end to what had been our honeymoon period.
Only six months earlier, a female Elvis impersonator had declared us husband and wife. A burlesque dancer pressed her cleavage into both of our faces as our friends cheered and threw dollar bills. A wedding in Vegas was my idea.
After two years of dating Marty, a cute roller hockey player with an unwavering moral compass, I knew I wanted to have a child with him. It was marriage, not commitment, that unnerved me. I wanted romance, freedom and to do things my way. The word “wife” induced an allergic reaction.
As Marty and I became parents and navigated adulthood together, my resistance to matrimony started to feel like an outdated quirk. The emotional equivalent of a person still rocking a septum piercing long after they stopped listening to punk music.
Marty had shown me, over and over, what it was to be a teammate. He’d rubbed my back through hours of labor, made late-night runs for infant Tylenol and was never afraid to cry at the sad parts of movies or take the occasional harsh piece of feedback about his communication style. And like all good teams, we kicked ass together. So why was I still resisting something that meant so much to him? To our family?
One random Saturday, at the Hawthorne In-N-Out Burger, after Marty ordered fries as a treat for our son, I finally said, “Screw it. Let’s get married.”
The wedding day was raucous and covered in glitter. We both wore white. Our son’s jacket had a roaring tiger stitched onto the back and was layered over his toddler-size tuxedo T-shirt. Loved ones from all over the country flew to meet us in a tiny pink chapel. A neon heart buzzed over our heads as we vowed to “love each other in sickness and in health, till death do us part.”
I couldn’t have imagined then that the next chapel I’d be in would be the hospital prayer room. Or that I would have begged a God I struggle to believe in to please spare Marty’s life.
Unlike our decision to marry, acute leukemia came on suddenly. Over the course of a few weeks, Marty’s bone marrow had flooded his blood with malignant cells. Treatment was urgent. He was taken by ambulance from the ER to the City of Hope hospital in Duarte, a part of Los Angeles County we’d never had a reason to visit before.
Traditionally the 50th wedding anniversary is celebrated with gold, the 25th with silver and the first with paper. But we couldn’t even afford to look paper-far-ahead anymore. Instead, we celebrated that the specific genetic modifiers of Marty’s cancer were treatable, the good chemo days and his being able to walk to the hospital lobby to see our son for the first time in weeks.
Leukemia has taught me things such as: how to inject antifungal medication into the open PICC (peripherally inserted central catheter) line in Marty’s veins, how to explain to our son that “Papa will be sleeping with the doctors for a long while so they can help him feel better” and that to do the hibbity-dibbity with a person going through chemo, you must wear a condom. But mostly my husband’s sickness has taught me about healthy love.
When we had a child together, we’d committed to being in each other’s lives forever. But marriage was different. We’d already made a promise to our son, but when we got married, we made one to each other and ourselves. We had gone all in.
Since his diagnosis two months ago, there have been so many ways we’ve shown love for each other. People assume that I would do all the caregiving, but it’s more than that. Yes, I’ve washed my husband’s feet when he couldn’t bend down, been the only parent at preschool dropoff and pickup, and advocated on Marty’s behalf to his health insurance with only a few choice expletives.
But my husband has also taken care of me. Even when he was nauseous, sweating and fatigued, Marty showed up. He made me laugh with macabre jokes about how the only way for us to watch anything other than “PAW Patrol” on TV together was for him to get hospitalized. He insisted that I make time to rest and bring him the car owner’s manual, so he could figure out why the check engine light had come on.
We’d promised in front of our closest friends and Elvis herself to love each other “for better or worse.” And when the worst arrived sooner than expected, we did more than love. We truly cared for each other as husband and wife.
The author is a writer whose short stories have been nominated for the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers and Best of the Net. She is working on a novel and lives in Redondo Beach with her husband and son. She’s on Instagram: @RachelReallyChapman.
L.A. Affairs chronicles the search for romantic love in all its glorious expressions in the L.A. area, and we want to hear your true story. We pay $400 for a published essay. Email LAAffairs@latimes.com. You can find submission guidelines here. You can find past columns here.
The missing 1916 painting Music, by Gabriele Münter. Its whereabouts have been unknown to the public since 1977. Oil on canvas. (Private collection. © 2025 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn)
The Guggenheim, New York
hide caption
toggle caption
The Guggenheim, New York
This is a story about a missing painting, from an artist you may never have heard of. Though she helped shape European modern art, German artist Gabriele Münter’s work was quickly overshadowed in the public’s mind by her 12-year relationship with noted abstract artist Wassily Kandinsky.
She met Kandinsky in Munich in 1902, and with his tutoring, she “mastered color as well as the line,” she told a German public broadcaster in 1957. Together with other artists, they founded an avant-garde arts collective called Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) in 1911.
Wassily Kandinsky’s Painting With White Border (Bild mit weißem Rand), 1913. Oil on canvas, Guggenheim Museum, New York City.
Allison Chipak/The Guggenheim, New York
hide caption
toggle caption
Allison Chipak/The Guggenheim, New York
At the time, most modern artists, like Kandinsky, were moving toward more and more abstract work. Not Münter. In her paintings, people look like people and flowers look like flowers. But her dazzling colors, simplified forms and dramatic scenes are startlingly fresh; her domestic scenes are so immediate that they feel like you’ve interrupted a crucial, private moment.
“Gabriele Münter was so pioneering, so adventurous in her adherence to life,” said Megan Fontanella, curator of modern art and provenance at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City. “She is revitalizing the still life, the landscape, the portrait genres, and presenting them in these really fresh and dynamic ways.”
Yet, perhaps due to her relationship with Kandinsky, her work was rarely collected by important museums after her death in 1962 (she herself said she was seen as “an unnecessary side dish” to him), and so her paintings largely disappeared from the public eye.
Now Münter is having a moment, with exhibitions this year in Madrid and Paris, as well as one currently at the Guggenheim in New York. The New York show is an expansive one and includes American street photography in the late 1890s, alongside over 50 paintings, from her dazzlingly colored European landscapes to portraits capturing the expressive faces of people she knew.
Gabriele Münter’s Self-Portrait in Front of an Easel (Selbstbildnis vor der Staffelei), circa 1908-1909. Oil on canvas. (© 2025 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn)
Bruce M. White/Princeton University Art Museum/Art Resource, N.Y.
hide caption
toggle caption
Bruce M. White/Princeton University Art Museum/Art Resource, N.Y.
Yet, when Fontanella was putting “Gabriele Münter: Contours of a World” together, there was one painting she couldn’t find: Music, from 1916.
In it, a violinist is playing in the center of a yellow room, with two people quietly listening. It’s set in a living room — but because it uses her wild colors and flattened figures, it feels vibrant and dramatic, not cozy or saccharine.
Fontanella said this painting is important because it provides a window into Münter’s life after she separated from Kandinsky, who had gone on to marry someone else. She was struggling financially, and she was no longer the promising young person she once was. But Fontanella said the painting shows she had found a new creative circle.
“There’s something really uplifting about that. You know, it speaks to her resilience, her sense of adaptation,” Fontanella said. Instead of showing those years as dark and challenging, it is serene and warm, joyful. “I think that’s really important because especially with a woman artist, it’s so easy to get tripped up in her biography and really see it colored by her romantic relationships when, in fact, the paintings tell a different story.”
Fontanella said she used every tool available to her to find Music. She worked with Münter’s foundation and contacted owners of collections in Europe and the United States, from institutions to private collectors. She read correspondence and catalogs from past exhibitions.
Gabriele Münter’s From the Griesbräu Window (Vom Griesbräu Fenster), 1908. Painting on board. (© 2025 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn)
Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau München, on permanent loan from the Gabriele Münter and Johannes Eichner Foundation, Munich
hide caption
toggle caption
Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau München, on permanent loan from the Gabriele Münter and Johannes Eichner Foundation, Munich
It’s not unusual for art to vanish from public view if it’s not held at an institution. Private collectors often want to keep their holdings quiet. If they don’t sell a particular work at an auction or lend it to a museum, only a very small number of people might know that it still exists and where it is.
Fontanella was able to trace Music to its last known owner — a German collector named Eugen Eisenmann, who had the painting in 1977.
“There was a moment where the collection was starting to be broken apart and dispersed and no longer being held by subsequent relatives or family members,” she said.
Then the trail ended.
Not the end of the story
But just because the painting hasn’t surfaced yet doesn’t mean it never will. Take the story of a piece called There are combustibles in every State, which a spark might set fire to. —Washington, 26 December 1786, depicting Shays’ Rebellion, one of 30 works in the Struggle series by artist Jacob Lawrence. A 2020 traveling exhibition organized by the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Mass., had brought the works together for the first time in 60 years.
Five of the paintings couldn’t be located, and the curators put placeholders where those paintings should have been: black-and-white photographs of the canvases if they existed, blank spaces if they didn’t.
“We didn’t have any image of it. There really was no trace,” said Sylvia Yount, the curator in charge of the American Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She co-curated the Met’s presentation of the exhibition with curator Randall Griffey. “We had decided to leave the missing panels as kind of an absence, to really underline the absence. There was a blank on the wall.”
And, then, the miracle.
A visitor to the exhibition went home, contacted a friend “and said, ‘I think you might have one of these missing panels,’” Yount explained.
The friend did. When Yount, Griffey and art conservator Isabelle Duvernois went to see the painting — which was just across Central Park from the Met in an apartment on the Upper West Side — “we walked in and immediately knew it was right,” Yount said.
Within about two weeks, it was hanging in the exhibition. Incredibly, not long later, a second panel was found. Because that one needed some conservation work and a new frame, it didn’t join the series at the Met, but it did become part of the show later as it traveled across the United States.
That kind of thing “doesn’t happen every day,” Yount said, laughing.
Could it happen again?
But Fontanella hopes that it could happen for Münter’s painting. She included a photograph of it in the catalog so that people would know what to look for.
“What I always hope with stories like this is that the painting will resurface in its own time, you know, when it wants to be discovered,” Fontanella said. “But there’s been so much genuine interest in Gabriele Münter as an artist, as a person, that I feel it’s only just on the horizon that this painting will come to light.”
“Gabriele Münter: Contours of a World” is on view at the Guggenheim in New York through April 2026.
Ciera Crawford edited this story for broadcast and digital. Chloee Weiner mixed the audio.
For those who help the poor, 2025 goes down as a year of chaos
Apex predator threatening Northwest salmon sparks rare bipartisan push to ‘kill more’
McDonald’s locks doors to keep out individuals who present ‘a risk’ in crime-ridden Minneapolis area
Missing 19-year-old Camila Mendoza Olmos believed to be ‘in imminent danger,’ Texas sheriff says
Murder in small-town America: The crimes that tore quiet communities apart in 2025
Florida High School Football Rankings: Top 25 teams – Oct. 21
Cleary's 21 help Le Moyne down Central Connecticut State 69-64 in OT
How old is Bo Nix? What to know about Oregon quarterback ahead of 2024 NFL Draft
99th annual Pony Swim held in Virginia
Video: ‘It Didn’t Have to Happen This Way:’ U.Va. Faculty Call for Review of Police Response to Protests
For those who help the poor, 2025 goes down as a year of chaos
Marjorie Taylor Greene criticizes Trump’s meetings with Zelenskyy, Netanyahu: ‘Can we just do America?’
US visa ban targets ex-Commissioner Breton over alleged censorship
‘Bomb cyclone’ forecasted to bring heavy snow, blizzard conditions and dangerous travel
The biggest losers of 2025: Who fell flat as the year closed
-
Entertainment3 days agoHow the Grinch went from a Yuletide bit player to a Christmas A-lister
-
Connecticut4 days agoSnow Accumulation Estimates Increase For CT: Here Are The County-By-County Projections
-
Entertainment5 days agoPat Finn, comedy actor known for roles in ‘The Middle’ and ‘Seinfeld,’ dies at 60
-
Milwaukee, WI5 days ago16 music and theater performances to see in Milwaukee in January 2026
-
World1 week agoPutin says Russia won’t launch new attacks on other countries ‘if you treat us with respect’
-
Indianapolis, IN2 days agoIndianapolis Colts playoffs: Updated elimination scenario, AFC standings, playoff picture for Week 17
-
Southeast3 days agoTwo attorneys vanish during Florida fishing trip as ‘heartbroken’ wife pleads for help finding them
-
World3 days agoSnoop Dogg, Lainey Wilson, Huntr/x and Andrea Bocelli Deliver Christmas-Themed Halftime Show for Netflix’s NFL Lions-Vikings Telecast