The Mother of All Toddler Books: An All-Canadian Guide to Your Toddler's Second and Third Years

Introduction Introduction | 1 | 2 | You've just been through an intensive year-long training program  designed to build your patience, increase your stamina, and test your  ability to survive with little or no sleep. The goal of all this  training? To prepare you for The Mother of All Challenges—surviving the toddler years! While raising a toddler certainly isn't for the faint of heart or the  squeamish, it isn't nearly as difficult as some people would have you  believe. The very same people who had you scared silly about going  into labour are doing a similar number on you right now, convincing  you that parenting a toddler is guaranteed to be an exercise in  torture. Their eyes positively gleam as they bombard you with  hair-raising tales of temper tantrums, hunger strikes, and the perils  of potty training. The end result? You're left with this sinking  feeling that you've just signed up to be a contestant on the most  frightening reality television show to date: Toddler TV! Fortunately, the scaremongers are about to fall off your radar screen  for the next 10 years or so, patiently biding their time until they can terrorize you with even scarier tales about teenagers. Until that happens, tune them out. After all, you've already figured out that their stories about 15-pound newborns, 96-hour labours, and foot-long episiotomy scars were, well, a little overblown. So it hardly makes sense to buy into their toddler tall tales, now does it? A toddler by any other name Before we get too much further into the book, we'd better tackle an important terminology issue: the definition of the word toddler. If you pick up an armful of parenting books, you'll see that child development experts aren't exactly in agreement about the term. Some experts insist that toddlerhood begins at age 12 months; others don't grant a baby toddler status until age 18 months or until he's actually walking. But where the real disagreement arises is in deciding when to mark an end to the toddler years. Some experts claim that toddlerhood lasts until a child starts school (around age five). Others argue that the toddler years come to an end as soon as a child turns three, at which point he becomes a preschooler (ages three and four). I tend to buy into this last school of thought. The reason is simple: I can't imagine lumping one-year-olds and four-year-olds together into the same category. It's hard enough to talk about one- and two-year-olds in the same breath, given the lightning speed at which developmental breakthroughs occur during the toddler years. I mean, preschoolers are practically civilized beings in many ways, while toddlers—toddlers—well, let's just say toddlers are not. So there you go: that's my rationale for focusing on one- and two-year-olds in this book and leaving the three- and four-year-olds for the next book in this series: The Mother of All Parenting Books. Made in Canada Now that we've pinned down the definition of a toddler, let's get  another important bit of housekeeping business out of the way: my rationale for writing a Canadian toddler book. As you've no doubt gathered by now, the vast majority of toddler books-and parenting books in general-are written by American authors. While some might argue that there's no need for an all-Canadian  parenting resource, I happen to disagree. If you flip through a typical American parenting book, you'll find pages and pages of material that simply doesn't apply to Canadian parents, like tips on shopping for juvenile products that may not even be available in this country. (In many cases, these products aren't available because they fail to measure up to our more rigorous product safety standards.) Even the chapters that are relevant to Canadian parents suffer from a major shortcoming: the expert sources cited time and time again in the book are almost exclusively American. What Canadian parents need is a book that reflects the reality of raising a toddler in Canada—a book that zeroes in on the unique challenges that Canadian parents face (the doctor shortage that plagues many communities across the country, for example) and that contains up-to-the-minute advice from such respected Canadian health authorities as the Canadian Paediatric Society and Health Canada. (Believe it or not, health authorities on both sides of the border don't always see eye to eye on key pediatric health issues.) Of course, it wouldn't be possible—or even advisable—to write a book that completely ignores what's happening south of the border. After all, some of the most significant breakthroughs in pediatric health in recent years have occurred in research laboratories in the U.S. What Canadian parents need, however, is a book that looks at that information through Canadian eyes and interprets it for a Canadian audience. My publisher and I think we're on to something with this all-Canadian focus. After all, the response to the first two books in this series—The Mother of All Pregnancy Books and The Mother of All Baby Books—has been nothing short of phenomenal. But enough with the flag waving for now! Let me tell you a bit about what The Mother of All Toddler Books has to offer. More...

 

© Copyright 2003 Ann Douglas. All rights reserved.