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3 hours ago
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Hi! It’s been quite a while. I’ve spent the past 2.5 years working on a book whose topic is “everything.” Not a small project. But it’s getting there—there’s a complete second draft, with illustrations and some more revisions still to do. I plan to return to the blog in full force when I’m done, but briefly popping in today because there’s some stuff I had to get off my chest.
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Back in 2023, I wrote a post about having my first baby and all the things that confused me about doing so.
Earlier this year, it happened again. Just like that, I was back here:
On one hand, now time doesn’t exist at all.
On the other hand, the second child is…easier than the first.
But I’m not here to talk about the new baby, delightful and obese as she may be. Today, I report to you from the depths of toddler parenthood. I always thought two-year-olds were basically unconscious blobs with a cold, but it turns out they’re actual people you can get to know. Having spent some time cohabitating with one, I’ve made the following discoveries:
1) You can be simultaneously completely obsessed with and dramatically bored by the same person.
Sometimes when I’m working in my office, my daughter will toddle in, run over to me, and give me a hug. It is by far the best part of my day. Her smile fills me with utter joy. Her little voice is sent straight from heaven. I feel the purest possible love for her.
It’s just that I also find her groundbreakingly boring. A five-minute hangout is one thing, but when I’m deep in an afternoon with her, it’s hard to come to any other conclusion than that I’ve spent my last three hours with a person whose IQ is 20.
2) Toddlers are dicks.
It’s well-known that toddlers transform into mid-20th-century totalitarian dictators at the drop of a hat.
But they’re dicks in less obvious ways too. The other day, my toddler was playing with Legos. I sat down next to her and asked her what she was building, and she said, “Daddy needs to work in his office?”—an unsubtle hint that I should leave her the fuck alone.
Or the times I cook a whole thing for her with care and love and she refuses to take a bite, making me feel cluey for myself.
Most recently, I made the mistake of telling her my age, and now she says “Daddy is 43” like 30 times a day, constantly filling me with existential dread.
3) No one wants to see videos of someone else’s toddler.
Toddler parenthood is a reality distortion zone that makes it hard to remember that most people find your toddler breathtakingly uninteresting.1
Friends who have kids the same age as yours are kind of in a cohort together, so parents of toddlers end up with a whole throng of toddlers in their lives. Amongst my cohort I’ve both been an offender and frequent victim of toddler-video-showing. It’s part of the tax we all pay.
I try to at least minimize the fallout from my end.
4) Someone else’s toddler can ruin your week.
5) Toddlers are geniuses who are also very dumb.
If I took my daughter to China for a year, and we just lived there with no language instruction, I’d come back knowing approximately six Mandarin words and she’d be fluent. It makes no sense to me that toddlers just learn a language by hearing the language, but somehow they do. They’re weird freak geniuses. But then my daughter says stuff like “would you like a strawberry?” when she wants a strawberry, because when we say “you,” it refers to her, so she now thinks “you” is a synonym for her name, which is very unimpressive.
Likewise, the other day I read her a new book for the first time, and then the second time I read it to her, she stopped me in the middle to correct something I said. It turns out I had accidentally skipped a word, which she knew because she somehow memorized the whole book on the first read. But then we’ll pick up another book and she’ll stare at the page for a million years looking for where Curious George is “hiding” even though he’s obviously right the fuck there.
6) Toddlers have a highly inaccurate worldview.
We sometimes take our toddler to story time at the library, where the librarian reads a book to a bunch of kids. The first time we took her, she decided to take matters into her own hands and, mid-story, went and sat in the librarian’s lap. The issue is that she hadn’t quite figured out that the world does not exist entirely for her benefit.
It’s understandable. You’re born into the world and for the first few years, everyone you see smiles and waves at you, so you overestimate your importance. Only slowly do you learn what’s really going on.2
This is part of the broader phenomenon of a toddler not really having any idea what’s going on. They don’t know about death, or money, or history, or sex, or the Big Bang, or basically anything about reality. They just emerged out of nowhere and started being, which for some reason doesn’t strike them as weird or confusing.
(A good “do you have any idea what’s going on?” litmus test is: If you’re walking down the street and an elephant flies down from the sky, hovers ten feet above you and says hello in a silly cartoon voice before flying off, would you be like “OH MY GOD WHAT JUST HAPPENED” or would you shrug and be like “I guess that’s something that happens”? If the latter, you have no idea what’s going on. Most two-year-olds fail this test.)
7) Toddlers are both the funniest and least funny possible people.
My daughter is remarkably unfunny. Once when she dropped something, I said “kerplunk,” and she found it fucking hilarious. For the next ten minutes, she kept picking things up, dropping them, and saying “kerplunk,” hysterically laughing each time.
But unintentionally, she’s a comedic genius. When I was in her way recently, she said, “Can you get out of space?” which my wife and I now say to each other whenever we want the other to move. Another time, we had to rip a band-aid off her leg, after which she said, “I am so perfectly sad,” and now my wife and I say that anytime we’re unhappy about something.3
We’ve also discovered an amazing hack: you can just teach a toddler to say whatever you want. We taught her to say “mamma mia” whenever she falls over, which I highly recommend to other toddler parents.
8) Toddler parents have very strong opinions and everyone is very judgy.
The problem is, for every strong opinion, there’s an equally strong opposite opinion.
I’ve taken to accepting that I’m messing up all kinds of things, and mainly just try to have fun with my little friend. To the extent that I have a strategy, it’s basically:
- Spend lots of (phone-free) time with her
- Show her that the world is a fun and fascinating place
- Encourage her to reason from first principles
- Don’t interrupt her when she’s focused or daydreaming; help her learn to be entertained by her own mind
- Refrain from imposing lots of little rules, but where there are rules, be firm about them
- Build problem-solving confidence, teaching her to be a person who says “I want to figure out the directions” instead of a person who says “let’s just ask someone”
Toddler parents can take solace in the fact that parenting probably matters less than we think it does. Rather than try to shape our little two-foot-tall companions, we should help guide them to become the best version of who they already are.
Anyway, gotta go. Time to read Squeak the Mouse Likes His House for the 57th time.
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More tales from fatherhood: 10 Thoughts from the Fourth Trimester
My favorite toddler books: Flotsam, Little Fur Family, The Giant Jam Sandwich, Goodnight Everyone, Little Owl’s Night
If you’d rather read about something other than my fat babies:
The Marriage Decision: Everything Forever or Nothing Ever Again
Taming the Mammoth: Why You Should Stop Caring What Other People Think
Why Cryonics Makes Sense
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