How to Stop Losing Patience with Your Toddler (and have more quality time instead)

During my experience working in early childhood education, I have heard how parents wish they had more patience, lost their tempers less, and felt less frustrated. It is overwhelming to keep up with the invisible labor of running a household, supporting your toddler’s development, and not losing your patience in the process.

So how can we get everything done and still be calm and connected to our children? I am starting with a look at how early childhood educators manage chaotic classrooms. Then I am transforming those strategies into something parents can use.

Ideal Image of Parenting vs. Reality of Parenting

Ideally, instead of losing their patience, parents want more time to focus on their children. They want to read, draw, imagine, explore, sing, and spend quality time with their child. At any point in the day, they want to be calm and to help their child through big emotions, defiance, and zoomie-high energy. Parents want to build a close relationship while also confidently supporting their child’s development.

Even more, as a parent, they would feel reassured that they were setting their children up for an even better life and future than they had themselves. Parents want to feel confident instead of worried. Connected instead of frustrated. Then maybe they could stop losing patience with their toddlers.

Why You are Losing Your Patience (This isn’t News)

Warning: this section may cause anxiety. Feel free to scroll ahead.

Of course parents are overwhelmed. Keeping a house clean, a fridge stocked, meals prepped, home projects completed, and chores done is a full-time job. Seriously, if you sank 40 hours a week into just maintaining your home, you would still have dusty baseboards and a pile of single socks. Parents don’t have the luxury of extra time.  They are either working or at home with children (acknowledging that SAH-parenting is beyond a 40 hour full-time job, with no retirement matching).  

It probably doesn’t even feel like there is time left over for your own self-care, personal development, or time to zone out entirely. In a perfect world, parents wouldn’t be exhausted from the other parts of life. They could pour more energy into their children. We can’t and that sucks. Of course, you’re frustrated and quick to lose patience with your toddler. Give yourself some grace.

On top of that, there is the immense pressure from family, news, society, pediatricians, social media, parenting books, and own personal parenting values that are adding to the overwhelm. It is hard to feel successful. The guilt of that is immense. Then add a toddler crying or climbing the counter while you’re scrubbing dishes. No one will ever be zen enough to just breathe through that chaos day after day.

Wow. Just dumping that all out into words caused me stress. No wonder we can’t stop losing patience with our children.

Early Childhood Education Strategies to Stop Losing Your Patience

Let’s talk through how early childhood teachers turn chaos into education and overwhelm into calm. Then I will let you know how you can take what those educators do with 10+ children in a classroom and apply it to parenting at home.

Sidenote: I am pumped. Here is where I get to put my college degree to work. Thank goodness because who even gets a degree in early childhood education? (…is literally a question my boss’s boss asked at my previous job).

Children Want to Connect with Important Adults

Early childhood theory teaches that, more than the adorable child-size furniture, water-filled sensory bins, piles of board books, and the jars of play dough, the most interesting object in the classroom is the teacher. No matter how incredible the environment is, the adult is the most interesting and important part of the room. Humans are biologically designed to connect with other humans.

Outside cases of severe trauma, children constantly seek out their teachers to protect, teach, guide, and care for them. They want adult attention because it is key to their development. It’s an incredible amount of power adults have. In your home, YOU are that super interesting object that a child is obsessed with. Not only does your child instinctually know they are dependent on you, they also love you so much they could literally cry if you have to leave the room (to pee). We’re lucky.

Use this Classroom Management Strategy at Home

In the most peaceful, nurturing, connected early childhood classrooms, the learning happens during daily routines. The children help serve food, they help clean up after meals, they HELP clean up toys. The younger the children in the room, the more the classroom curriculum is based on these basic, daily tasks. Teachers design their lesson plans to connect with children during the mundane routines that happen every day. This includes diaper changes, nap times, meal service, and clean ups.  

• Putting on coats to go outside has to happen anyway, so teachers use it as a learning experience.
• Serving meals has to happen, so teachers plan language or math activities to co-occur during those routines.

Managing a classroom requires an immense amount of planning, cleaning, prepping, cleaning, tasks, chores, routines, and cleaning. In an ideal world, teachers would not have to manage all this and could focus on education through play. In an ideal world, parents would not have to work, clean, do chores, cook, pick up toys, and argue over picking up toys and instead could focus on spending time with their kids.

When parents can find ways to include their children in their daily home life, they will stop losing patience with their toddlers. This means including them in chores and routines that steal away so much of our time.

Build Connection By Including Your Child in Daily Routines

Are adults more efficient at cleaning than toddlers? One hundred percent usually. But the best teachers know that efficiency is not the point. The best teachers trust that moving at a child’s pace lets the best connection and learning happens. I believe every early childhood educator must go through this dramatic mindset shift. They realize that their job is not to “get through cleaning the table” so that they can “get to the teaching.” Teaching happens constantly.

As parents, we need to stop feeling like we should “get through the chores” to “get to the parenting.” We also need that dramatic mindset shift. We are modeling and parenting constantly. We cannot fully alleviate the stress of jobs and the overwhelm of to-do lists. But there are ways to feel more confident as a parent. You can spend quality time with your child and support their development while completing a household to-do list. You can start appreciating the connection you and your child can build while picking up toys.

• In a world where you don’t lose your patience, what does parenting look like?
• What values and skills do you wish you had time to teach your child?
• How much quality time would you spend with them? 

I hate to be the one to tell you that the ideal vision will never actually happen. There is no higher plane that you magically level-up to as a parent. While you spend time doubting yourself, you’re still parenting and your children are growing up. How can you reframe your mindset to appreciate the time you have now?  

• Need some encouragement? Explore quotes for exhausted parents by Moms Need a Break Too.

How to Connect with Your Child During Household Routines/Chores

Infants and toddlers learn through consistent, predicable routines. The most boring tasks, on repeat, can be pure wonder for them. And honestly, that’s incredible. Toddlers and preschoolers want to be close to you, get involved, and it’s an absolute bonus for them if they feel like they are helping you.

I support ignoring the dishes in the sink. But I also know that just remembering there are dishes in the sink can suck my mental energy.  So I suggest taking a page out of those calm, cool early childhood teachers’ playbooks and invite your child to hang out with you will you do dishes. Invite your toddler into the dishwashing process, or at least into the kitchen. Instead of rushing through the dishes to get to the next thing, you take a page out of your wonder-struck toddler’s playbook and slow down to a child’s pace. Enjoy the moment. Breathe in and out and be a smidge zen.  

• Can your child bring their toys into the kitchen while you wash?
• Can they play in the water next to you while you load the dishwasher?
• Can they be responsible for putting the forks into the dishwasher’s utensil rack?

Have Peace with Taking Time for Yourself

As a bonus, when you feel confident that you supported you child’s development while prepping supper, you won’t feel so guilty sneaking off to read a book or shower alone as your personal form of self-care. Oh, and about self-care.

Sometimes small morning habits lead to extraordinary results. Check out SoulCareMom’s free resource: Kickstart Your Calm Morning.

Tough Questions for Parents to Consider

• Do we busy ourselves cleaning and cooking because we feel more confident in those things than we do parenting?
  • “I can’t parent right now because I have to go fix supper, wash dishes, do laundry, plan our vacation.”
• What are we teaching our children when they always see us doing dishes instead of playing with them?
• What have you left for your child to connect with while you are connecting with dish soap and plates?

Check in with Yourself

Maybe you’re buying into this idea a little, or at least thinking about it. Or maybe you are thinking about it because you’re criticizing my audacity. It’s fine because I got you thinking.  

One barrier you might find is that you desperately just want to scrub the counter alone. Cool. Do that. If you are going to invite your child into helping with household chores, take time to plan the boundaries. 

• Which housework is not feasible to include them in and which do you just want to rush through and move on from? 
• Which chores are you willing to slow down to complete at your child’s pace? 

If you attempt my outrageous recommendation to let your child help with chores, always remember why you started implementing these things. It will not always be fun or easy. You can do tasks much faster without your child. But please consider this:

Take the 15 minutes you spend quickly doing a chore on your own. Then you multiply that by 5 week days. You have spent over an hour at home, but disconnected from your child. Now consider when you do an hour of daily tasks a night. One hour might not seem like a lot (unless it’s an hour nap, right right?). But think of the proportion of your child’s life one hour is. One hour is a big piece of the short time they have been on this earth.

From my understanding, in an ideal world, you wanted more time with your child. And what you child really wants it more time with you, you interesting object.  

TLDR

As parents, we lose our patience because we have very little control over our time. We have to work and run a household. We are expected to just accept that our lives are not exactly how we want them to be. That frustration can come to a head when our children are feeling their emotions, moving at their pace, or trying to have some power over their own lives.

What we want is a world where we can feel confident that we are supporting our child’s development and giving them the calm, loving attention they deserve. Like the way early childhood teachers can provide engagement, connection, and education during the most basic daily routines, parents can slow down and include their own children in the housework and daily chores that have to be done. By doing this, parent can meet their children’s needs, spend quality bonding time, and hopefully gain a little peace of mind to relax during self-care practices while the clothes are drying.

Wait, Wait, Wait….

You might think I have stepped outside of outrageously brilliant and into the realm of outrageously crazy. Let’s talk about it. If you are interested in attempting my recommendations, but don’t know where to start – I would truly love to help. Please leave a comment or send me a message at alysia@wellbeingswithalysia.com