We're currently running a special limited time five week Q&A series exclusively for our Bratbusters boot camp members. Throughout April, I'm featuring selected member questions alongside the most common implementation hurdles in an exclusive episode each week for five weeks. If you're not already a member, it's not too late to be part of this series. You'll get an instant access to the episodes already released and the final episode question submission deadline is April 23 at 3pm Pacific Time. Go to bratbusters.com or check out the podcast description to learn more and join the Bratbusters boot camp today. When you make them feel good, they do good. And when they feel bad, they do bad. They know when you're playing to them in their world and they just feel so loved, so treasured and so respected. Welcome to the Bratbusters Parenting Podcast. My name is Lisa Bunnage. I'm a parenting coach. I'm a mom. I'm also a grandmother. And I'm Amy Bunnage, Lisa's daughter, and I handle the marketing and planning here at Bratbusters. While I don't have kids, each episode will dive into parenting topics and Lisa will answer your questions. Let's get started. Okay, what are we talking about today, sweetie? Well, today we are going to do another one of these shorter podcast episodes. We don't have parenting questions specifically and it's all going to be how to connect and play with your toddler. Because in the comments, we had, we did one recently and we had parents asking if you could do it about specific age groups. The reason why we did the first one was because some people don't always think to ask what we might, what I might think is important to talk about, right? But like parents mostly ask about discipline, but I'm not about discipline at all. It's a tiny part of what I do. It's just something you got to get out of the way. My strength with kids is connecting, playing with them, bonding with them, making them feel good, making them happy. That has always been my strength with kids, okay? And so, yeah, so we're going to talk about how to connect with toddlers. And to me, a toddler is about 16 months. It could be a bit of a gray area, 16, 17 months, but up to 35 months. Okay, so just under three. So that's the age we're talking about, which is very handy for me. I've got a two-year-old granddaughter and I have her one day a week and we're playing the whole time. She's totally in charge of grandma, but she's very well-behaved with grandma too, because she knows grandma doesn't take any, she's a good kid, but you know, grandma wouldn't take any bad behavior. But you know, I'm very good at connecting with toddlers. I know how to play with them. I know what they like and I know what brings out the best in them. So that's what we're going to focus on here. Before we get into just some suggestions that you have, do you want to talk about maybe a mistake that a lot of toddler parents make when they're trying to connect with their toddlers? When they're trying to connect with their toddlers, they often will take them places or buy them things and then they'll watch them play and talk to them while they're playing. Connecting is different. Connecting is getting on the floor and playing with them in their world. You enter their world and they know the difference. They love it when you watch them too. Don't get me wrong, they love that. But it's just that much better when you do it with them in their world. Let them lead the way with play. And then I like to come up with a bunch of really crazy imaginative stuff that they wouldn't have thought of, you know, make-believe stuff. Like for example, with my granddaughter, I use the pillow. There's a button, they have buttons on their couch and I use the pillow as the garage door. She pushes the button and I go meh. And then she parks her bus underneath the pillow and that's the garage door. She knows it's not a garage door. She knows that that button isn't working, but she loves the fact that I'm, she knows I'm doing it just for her. She knows I don't do that with her father. It's 36, right? They know when you're playing to them in their world and they just feel so loved, so treasured and so respected. And that really does almost stop any bad behavior, even just with that. Because you're so connected in their world, why would they act out? There's a whole different level of connection with that child. And then they tend, you're bringing out the best in them. You're making them feel good. And when they feel good, they do good. Now toddlers are going to be crazy sometimes anyway, but generally that's the idea. When you make them feel good, they do good. And when they feel bad, they do bad. Don't just buy them expensive toys and take them to the park and watch them play and applaud them from a seat. You get in the swing with them. You don't have to do it every single time, but do it once in a while. Get on the swings with them. Get down on the ground with them and play with them. Most parents are pretty good at that, but not all parents are. Not all parents realize how important that is and make believe. They love it when you make stuff up. They know you're playing to them. They know that you're playing in their world. They know you're doing that just with them. They pick up on that energy. It's really cute actually, because they don't see you doing that with other adults, right? Pretending that the button is a garage door button. Opener, you see? They know that and they love it. Makes them feel special. Like you've got your own little secret world going on with them. They love it. Makes them feel like a million bucks. Okay. Do you have any specific ideas? Well, at the park, I do go down the slide a lot. I do recommend that you get in the pool with them. You get to play in the water with them. You dance around with them. You sing with them. Anything that they love doing. Now, they have pretty good imaginations, but you can usually come up with more. What I would suggest you do is you go online and you say, good imagination activities to do with a toddler. The internet has way more ideas than I do. AI does whatever. Just ask them for all this information. There's so much cute stuff out there. One of my clients told me, she goes, I don't know how to enter their world. I'm just not like that. And I said, well, you know, I had all these great ideas. You know what she did? Her little girl was a, I don't know, like two or something. And she gave me permission to tell this. I thought this was adorable. And she said her little girl was just upset about something. She was overtired. And so the mum said, oh, she goes, who's calling? And then she goes, she picks up her daughter's foot and answers it like a phone. The little girl, she goes, it was one, it was the most beautiful moment. She says that we had had in a long time. Like just that moment with the little girl, it was just nothing but silly, right? Talking to her daughter's foot like it was a phone, stuff like that. Just crazy stuff. You know, like I often just put my hair, I'll put my hair up in a, in one ponytail and it goes over the front of my face. And then my granddaughter thinks that's hilarious. She didn't see me do that with an adult, but just silly, just think silly. I love silly. Fun is their love language. Silly is their love language. They know when you're playing to them in their world. They just know it. Even with my niece, it's like, I'll take a sip of water. And every single time I do, I go, yum, yum, yum, yum, yum, yum, yum. And it's like, now she expects it. And it's really just lovely because it's like you can tell, and again, I'm not a parent, but you can just tell that it's like those little things. She knows I'm not taking a sip and going, yum, yum, yum, yum, yum for you. Well, it was cute because she did it. She was looking for anti-Amy when she was doing it because there was a bunch of people around. So she knew when she did it, yum, yum, yum, yum, yum, yum, she knew that it was for anti-Amy. So yeah, we all have our different relationships with kids too because we do different things. But they pick up on that. That's where the real connection is. And the better connected you are with your toddler, the less likely they are to act out. The higher their self-esteem, they're not really into self-esteem yet, but it's going to improve as they get a little bit older. But yeah, they're going to feel good about themselves. They're going to feel treasure. They're going to feel loved. They're going to feel valued too. You know, you love your children. You die for them, right? But if you really enjoy them, they're just a whole different level of confidence and with feeling loved because they feel so valued and worthwhile when you enter their world. It's just different. It just is. Are your kids driving you nuts? They don't have to. Check out bratbusters.com for my boot camp courses if you want to learn how to become a leader. I think also you talk about this, you were talking about when you go out. What about when you're on the walk there? Well, the walk, you know, it's interesting because years and years ago, I heard this really cute story and it was this grandmother was taking her grandchild to the park and the child was like two. So she's taking her little grandchild to the park and this kid stopped and looked at every blade of grass, every stone. Even dog poop was interesting. I mean, this kid was just and the grandmother kept saying, come on, we got to go to the park, go to the park. They get to the park and by the time they got there, the kid was tired and had a tantrum and she realized that it was the it was the journey, not the destination. That kid didn't care about the park. That kid, everything was new to that little toddler. So the grandmother realized that the next time they went to the park, they took like an hour to get there. And then by the time they got there, they went for one little swing and then they came home again. I like with my granddaughter, we do in the rain, we do, we, you know, we don't can't just walk anywhere, but we'll do puddle jumping. I'll get all dressed up. We'll bring an umbrella and then we just jump in puddles. Okay. But we'll, we're going somewhere. We're going to the store, let's say, but it might take us an hour and a half to get there and it's only a five minute walk. She loves jumping in puddles. That's her world. It's not the destination they care about. It's the journey because they live in the moment. They live in the present moment. They're not like us. They're not planning stuff ahead of time. They live right in the moment and we kind of learn a lot from them. We can get in the moment too, because I'm always planning. I'm always writing things I want to do tomorrow. But when I'm with my granddaughter, I'm present right here right now in the moment. They can teach us a lot. Now, what about, let's say, rainy day? You just don't have any good puddles to jump in. What do you do inside? I do a lot of dancing, a lot of singing with you guys. I made a lot of play dough. We were talking about that the other day. I cooked up a lot of play dough and you remember one of your memories was you can still smell it was flour and salt or whatever was in there. And you said it was, you remember that it was always too hot to use it first because she would put it down. And then we would be deciding what color while it cools down because you would need the coloring into it. Yeah. I remember the smell so distinctly and it's just, I remember you being like, can't touch, can't touch. I'm sure my little lobster claws were like, let me touch it. I want to touch it right now. But yeah, there's always lots to do, but I always had like a whole bunch of stuff up my sleeve. Another thing that I used to do is I used to save all the old Kleenex boxes and toilet roll holders and I would get all the, like I would set up, I cut the top off the Kleenex box and that would be the garage. And then I would attach a whole bunch of toilet rolls together. So the garage would be up on top of a coffee table or something, which I would tape it on top there. And then I would connect a whole bunch of toilet rolls and then they would be where the cars would be shoot down to the bottom and that and then they might hit a pillow or something. I was always saving all this old recyclable stuff and we were building stuff. Kids don't care about expensive stuff or anything fancy. They like something new because they're in the discovery stage. They love new stuff. Anything new excites them. So just looking at something different, I even would take the exact same toys and just we'd play with them differently. I remember once they were napping and while they were sleeping, I turned all their books around in their bedroom on the bookshelf. I turned them all around so you couldn't see the back. You know, you couldn't see the name of the book. You could just see the pages. Well, they just took all those books and they put them back in. It was the exact same bookshelf, the exact same books. All I did was turn them around. It kept them busy for like an hour. So just think about moving stuff around too. So I always had something up my sleeve and we didn't have the internet back then. My gosh, there's so much information out there. I would be scroll. I wouldn't even play with my kids probably. I'd be scrolling about all the ideas we could be doing because remember, I'm a planner. I don't live in the moment. No, that's not true. I would have been doing all that stuff. Well, something and I felt very proud of myself for discovering this yesterday is, you know, those, I mean, we're not sponsored by this company, but Magnetiles. How do you want to say what they can do? Okay. She was telling, okay, we had our Easter thing yesterday. I don't know when you're going to see this, but anyway, we had our Easter family thing. So my daughter, with my granddaughter and my son and his family and all that. So we're all together and your husband. And so she was, Amy was telling us that she'd seen online where, you know how the corner of inside your house, there's the metal, there's the metal brackets, like the shape like a, what's that? Like, anyway, it's the corner bracket. It's always metal. Magnetiles stick to it. Well, I got into this and I stuck out. They literally can stick magnetiles to the wall on the corners. So I'll tell you, when those parents, when that mom gets home the next time after I have my granddaughter, their whole place is going to be magnetized. Every single corner is going to have magnets all over it. I didn't know that. What a great idea. Those things are fantastic too. We never had those growing up. No, we didn't. And I love those things. And, and we go to the library a lot too. I take my granddaughters to the library and they have like whole bunch of different magnetiles. She, she's not even that interested in them, but I play with those really hard. I really get into that. But now that I know you can stick them on walls. My poor daughter-in-law, she's going to come home to a whole house is going to be decorated in magnet. It is a whole new world that's opened up for my mom. Whole new world for grandma. I do like playing. I like silly stuff. I have a lot of toddler in me. So yeah, I'm going to love that. But yeah, just look online. There's a whole bunch of different things you can do. But remember, they don't care about exciting or expensive. They care about new. Anything different is what they love. And you also talk about this as well, especially if you're a new parent and maybe even if you are the stay at home parent or you work, it's, it can be so nice to find that community and like libraries and just like daycare, not daycare centers, but you know what I mean? Play centers. Well, you look up and also community centers are great for that. Libraries are great. Anything government run schools have often have things for toddlers for like they have programs running while schools running. They often have a program running for parents just to turn up. It's free and just look up just anything that's run by the government. Look up toddler activities run by the government. So a lot of libraries, a lot of community centers and schools have all sorts of programs you can just drop in with your toddler. And then there are around other toddlers at social time. It's something new. They're singing songs. The only thing that kind of upsets me is when they sing their songs different from the way I do. There's that song that I used to sing to you kids. I love you in the morning and in the afternoon. I love you in the evening and underneath the moon skin. Lydink or inked ink. Well, one of the ladies at one of these community places, it's skin and marunka skin or something. They say it wrong. Through me off like you wouldn't believe I can't say it. So it's funny how a lot of those old nursery runs different people say it different ways. There's quite a few like that. I do enjoy how you say you didn't say they say it differently. They say it wrong. They say it wrong. And there yeah, there's quite a few of them. So and all of us moms and grandmothers, we were all laughing because we all have our different renditions of it. Cause we used to say, or especially a grandmother's, we used to sing it different to our grandkids and even the itsy bitsy spider. She doesn't say itsy bitsy. It's something, something else. So yeah, it was really cute. But then the kids think that's funny that grandma's always pointing out, but I always say it this way. Well, you know, this is another way of singing that. So it's just fun. You meet all these other people with kids and it's fun. It was fun for me too. And not just my granddaughter and not just my kids when they were little. It's fun for the parents too. Okay. So we've kept this is a little short episode. Is there anything else you want to add in about playing and connecting with the toddler? Find your inner silly. They love silly stuff. Don't try and be academic or clever or don't try and teach them stuff all the time. That's okay, but be silly. Walk around like a duck and quack. They love that kind of stuff. They know you're playing to them. You're playing to their world. It makes them feel like a million bucks. And when they feel good, they do good. Okay. So yeah, find your inner silly, your inner toddler. I think that's a great place to end. Okay. Thanks so much for joining us back again soon talking about another parenting topic. Happy parenting. Thanks for tuning in. If you're ready to dive deeper, check out bratbusters.com to learn more about the behavior board, parenting courses and private 101 coaching with Lisa. If you've enjoyed the show so far, we'd love it if you could take a moment to follow, rate and review us on your favorite podcast platform. Your feedback helps us reach more parents just like you. The information provided in this podcast is for general informational purposes only and is not intended as a substitute for professional advice. Lisa is a parenting coach, mom and grandmother. She is not a licensed psychologist or counselor. Her services do not replace the care of psychologists or other healthcare professionals. For a full disclaimer, please visit bratbusters.com forward slash disclaimer.
