This is part of a practical parenting series: five trimesters, five years (this), five grades (WIP). This isn't going to be the only body of writing that you read on the subject, so I'm definitely not intending to be comprehensive.
Toddlers and preschoolers are both fantastic and exhausting. They are curious and cuddly and clever. They eat, sleep, and learn in their own personal timezone. My job as a parent is to raise international super spies: self-sufficient, ethical dissidents with a deep sense of diplomacy, personal agency, and powerful physicality. You won't have money or time but you'll have a tiny clone who says "Good night beautiful mommy" when you tuck her in at night so ok.
I grouped eating, sleeping, and safety as “keeping them alive” (section 1). The ongoing disclaimer in this whole series is that my observations worked great for me but if they don’t work for you, well, they are only based on N=2, so go read Emily Oster. I grouped learning, playing, and exploring under “teaching them to thrive” (section 2) and have a lot more opinions in that section in my capacity as engineer and feminist. I wrap up with some unformed thoughts about maintaining your own adult identity (section 3) but it’s only honest to call out that this is the place I do the worst so my musings are the most tentative.
For weekday breakfast at home we cycle between hot oatmeal, eggs, bagels, cereal, and English muffins. For weekend breakfast we usually spend a bit more time and get a bit more creative; you can travel the world with pancakes (Japanese doroyaki, Korean hotteok, Moroccan beghrir, Russian olady, Swedish crepes…).
For packed school lunch I use Bentgo bento boxes and in the five compartments go: dinner leftovers or a ham sandwich in the big; cut up rainbow vegetables (tomatoes, red peppers, cucumber, carrots), hummus, yogurt sticks or string cheese in the mediums; and berries in the small. The girls’ preschool is modern and nut-free so there are some variations that only come out for weekend picnics, like apple slices with peanut butter. For weekend brunch we often treat ourselves to Chinese buns.
Snacks: It is prohibited by the Geneva conventions to arrive at preschool pickup without a snack in each hand. I’m pretty good about serving whole unprocessed foods for most meals but for snacks I let the length and breadth of the Korean supermarket populate our afternoons. Pocky, pineapple cakes, honey butter potato chips, shrimp crackers. Just have something, and keep a stash of gummies or lychee jellies in the bike basket, the car trunk, and your purse just in case.
For weekday dinner we basically mix and match four proteins (sausage, chicken, fish, and beef) and four carbs (rice and beans, pasta, couscous, noodles), with occasional substitutions or takeout. Friday is always homemade pizza night. At restaurants, the sum total of me + 2 little girls usually consumes 1 man-sized entree, so that’s what we order and share, then they have to share what we agree on as opposed to getting cheese quesadillas or chicken nuggets or whatever is on the kids menu. They have to try everything and after a taste, they are allowed to say “no thank you” but I don’t like to hear “yuck”.
Sleeping is all about routine and healthy routines are gold. My younger is amazing: at 7:45pm precisely, she goes to the bottom of the stairs and announces that she’s ready for her bottle. We go up and while I settle in the armchair, she makes her little circuit: close the curtain, turn on sound machine and turtle nightlight, dim the overhead lights, select a book. We read a handful of stories while she finishes her milk, then I fly her to her crib and tuck her in and leave. The whole thing takes 15 minutes, 20 tops. Up through last year she wore a sleep jacket but has recently upgraded to a blanket, and I’ll convert her crib to a toddler bed in the next six months or so when she requests it. She wakes up every day at 6:45am precisely and naps for exactly two hours every afternoon. It’s divine.
In contrast, my older is — shall we say — less structured. The constant between them is just the fact that they both find pleasure in reading and being read to, so one priority in our house is that every room have a sturdy bookshelf they can reach. I didn’t formally sleep train either of them but I was probably better about the younger because there was less room to make exceptions and still have a functioning household. Anyway: YMMV, do your best, it’s not your fault, etc. My particular sleep gospel was Taking Cara Babies.
They can probably dress themselves by age 2.5 or so but it will be a production for another year and their Crocs will be on the wrong feet for a while after that. You can lie about how long things take if you need to because they can't tell time. It's worth developing the mindset that changing a diaper somewhere non-standard is whimsical, not burdensome.
- Age zero: You have to vaccinate and should already start swim lessons as a survival skill. We didn’t do any screen time for either before their first birthday. Car seats go backwards. Eat lots of Bambas (the Israeli peanut butter puff).
- Age 1: Bike helmet on the balance bike! Teach them explicitly how to get up AND down stairs and ladders. They could both watch a video on the wall projector if they were dancing to it at this age but I didn’t like the idea of them just sitting and staring yet. Cut hot dogs into little octopuses so they don't choke.
- Age 2: Go to the dentist. Wear sunscreen & sun hats. Screen time was an episode of Daniel Tiger or Peppa Pig or whatever on a weekend (~20-25min). Car seats can flip around and face forwards. They should know that if anyone ever makes them feel uncomfortable they can say NO and leave.
- Age 3: Supervise sharp knives but definitely buy them a scaled-down chef's knife and make them learn. Screen time was an episode of Octonauts or Bluey or similar on weekdays as well as weekends (still ~20-25min; check Common Sense Media if you're not sure). They should know their and their parents' full name, address, and phone number. I tended to AirTag them when we went international.
- Age 4: An episode per weekday and a movie per weekend day during quiet time (I am intending for this to be the maximum for the duration of elementary school, but I'll report back after they discover Minecraft). For our context, I said they could stop swim lessons as soon as they could swim across a calm pool without a life jacket. If you live on a dock or somewhere with tides your standards might be higher. Car seats can become booster seats.
I called this section “frustration” because everyone cries. Babies with an unmet need, toddlers having a meltdown, preschoolers being extra, mothers on their last nerve. It’s universal to deal with frustration, as opposed to the topic of “discipline”, which seems unidirectional.
The way I think about dealing with frustration is in two parts: the pre-action and the re-action. The pre-action is setting yourself up for success by being generally well-rested, hydrated, not too hot, not carrying anger from work, not walking in to a place you resent being, etc. The example for me is that I love “child-accepting” places like family friendly wineries and the great outdoors. I find “child-focused” places like Chuck-E-Cheese gross and manufactured and won’t go unless I have to, because I resent being there and I find myself getting on my last nerve sooner than if I was somewhere calm. Only the adult can really participate in setting the pre-action because you need a sense of the future.
For the reaction, yelling isn’t great but sometimes you will, bribes aren’t really sustainable but sometimes you make the exception, etc. No hitting or biting not ever, and no saying anything you don’t want to live on as the inside voice when your kid is older. After everything calms down it’s always worth thanking the kid for what parts they did do right even if it was a small fraction of the total incident.
I begrudgingly put “School” in the same section with “thriving” only because of how insanely fortunate we have been to end up in situations where they prioritize social-emotional learning over formal academic readiness. Hands down the most useful aspect of our preschool was the mixed-age nature, from 3 months to 5 years. When an establishment is just babies all being vegetables together or two year olds who don’t see the four year olds they might have aspired to be, it’s a loss all round. In a mixed age environment the bigs take care of the littles, the littles idolize the bigs, and everything sorts itself out. The second best part of their preschool was language immersion which is great and important, but still a distant second on the path to becoming a many-dimensional human being with a sense of your place in society.
If you live in a city and have an opinion about their education, by around the time they’re 3-4 you’ll likely have to apply for kindergarten and the expectations for the application process can feel insane if you let them. Susie Allison (@busytoddler on Instagram) has some good opinions on the kind of “kindergarten readiness” that I resonate with, like being able to name and manage their emotions, open their own lunch containers, clean up after themselves when they play, and use scissors to cut paper into shapes. Academically, if you’re only going to teach them one character set they should probably know it or at least the first ~100 by age 5 but if you’ve got a few it’s probably ok to be incomplete. It’s more important to participate in the running of a household than it is to do flashcards or phonics.
This part of having little kids around is my favorite. We have what we call the art tower: a set of shelves and drawers at kid-height full of magnifying glasses and plastic eyedroppers and feathers and sand. With these raw materials we can kick off lots of child-directed sensory projects, and I can step in sometimes to help them level up (“What if we…”) but often they can turn a piece of giant paper into a beach or a solar system with minimal direction. We have one big working project table in the living room where the default state is covered in clean butcher paper, ready to be tempera painted or glued. We have one big working project wall in the hallway where they can either do their standing works (I cover the bottom 3 feet strip in the same giant paper so they can paint, draw, and stick items). I keep a rainbow of painters tape rolls that they can use to make racetracks on the floor.
Art intersects with science, but so of course do all stages of food preparation. We use the construct of "interesting fruit Wednesday" where we have tomatoes or cucumbers in the pots out front, forage blackberries or loquats from the back walkway, or go to a new market for dragonfruit or coconuts. Cooking and baking are science because you get a sense of quantities and measuring, as well as observing chemistry. Everything is a project and you don’t usually need a “kit”, although I will say my husband and older daughter successfully occupied themselves for weeks building a LEGO Saturn V kit that she was proud of, so it’s not like I see no value. Anyway all kids are scientists if you don’t squash the urge to experiment. The best way to do this is with bookshelves they can reach and are in the habit of reaching (yes, bookshelves again).
There’s some adage like “playing is the work of childhood” and it’s spot on. Unstructured, disorganized, messy, sensory, exploratory creative play is the best. We don’t do organized activities outside of swim lessons, so most weekends instead of going to soccer or gymnastics we can have quests. We might ride our bikes to the farmers market and learn what to do with artichokes or Gai lan, check out books at the library, and decide what to do for our art projects. I have always found success in the strategy of looking for ways to say yes as long as it doesn’t conflict with our values. Can we learn about whales? Yes…hang on while I google… ok sure it happens to be migration season so we can visit Half Moon Bay and look for gray whales off the coast, and then next Saturday go down to the Monterey Bay Aquarium, and we can paint a big ocean scene on the tile walls of the bathtub, and we can go to the store and get five kinds of seaweed snacks so you can pretend to eat like one also. When you read the section below called “learning” you will not be shocked to hear that the tactics are similar to enabling play.
In case of boredom (never!) I keep bikes, sand toys, a kite, chalk, a hammock, and tubes of bubbles around as buffer. If all that fails, the girls can get a lot of mileage out of sticks, rocks, mudpiles, and lizards. For rainy days or if there’s bad air quality there’s dress up or cooking experiments or dancing with the wall projector. When their feet are little and soft you need Baby Bogs (neoprene rainboots) but when they are big and stompy you need Crocs brand boots that they can pull on themselves.
Beyond just cognitive benefits, the kind of playing that adults would recognize as “running around yelling” has the added benefit of burning energy. This is clutch. Giving them every possible opportunity to burn energy, and siphoning it off when things are too extra, is one of the key strategies for keeping a good quality of life. They need some skills here, so I have always been proactive about supplying wheels and practice time: birthday present at age 1 was a scooter, age 2 was a balance bike, age 3 a pedal bike, age 4 a bigger bike, age 5 roller skates with a lesson at Church of 8 Wheels. For age 6 I’m intending to get them skateboards and a few days of skate camp.
Travel is the intentional experiencing of anything unfamiliar. Leila was privileged enough to explore Belize, Italy, and Mexico by the time she was three, but that doesn’t default to making you “cosmopolitan” or “worldly” unless you work to go beyond the walls of the Mariott where the staff speaks English and you can pay in dollars for your hot dog. Travel is about language and cultural cues, history, social expectations, and making mistakes. It’s the reinforcement that other families don’t use strollers past baby age because they’re not fun on cobblestones.
Imaginary travel is a concept I came up with during quarantine. We’ve been to Turkey, Polynesia, Korea, Brazil, Navajo Nation, and more without leaving the Bay Area. We use international grocery stores, educational YouTube, and thoughtful crafting and cooking projects. If it’s not a sunny day here in SF, you can hop on regional transit and go somewhere for lunch: CalTrain to San Mateo for Taiwanese, Bart to San Leandro for West African, ferry to Alameda to a brewery. To me, unfamiliar transit is also an aspect of travel. I want confidence that when I send them for their first solo trips when they’re older, that they’ll have an intuition for getting around safely, and that they’ll feel empowered to explore their interests.
Camping in the great outdoors is a kind of real travel that isn’t always classified the same way. There’s honestly probably a whole separate post here about camping with kids, but the tldr is that any even temporary removal of the familiar will help build resiliency. Sleeping at Grandma’s for the night is travel if you’ve only ever slept in one bed. Going to a full-service resort is travel if you’ve never ventured abroad as a family before. Glamping is just earlier on the spectrum than going ultralight in the backcountry. There’s no reason you can’t travel with a baby (I have; lots of people do), and you totally should if you have somewhere you want to be. That being said, it’s increasingly fun after they are like 18months old and can run around new jungles and speak new languages with other local kids, or paddle around new river bends themselves, or catch new lizards.
This section feels like an afterthought because it is. It’s a weird time of identity because you are absolutely “Diana’s Mom” in a bunch of people’s phones and it would be hypocritical to complain because they are “Emily’s Dad” in yours.
You have to decide how you continue to express yourself and what can pause. I want to lift weights, read books, and swim laps without interruption. To be totally candid, until my younger was around 2, I did none of that. I’m coming back, and it feels great.
You have to have a mom uniform you don’t hate or feel frumpy in otherwise it wears you down. There can totally be a “mom at work” uniform and a “weekend mom” uniform but you have to be able to get dressed with what I can best describe as a “one of each” strategy, that is to say, grab a pair of pants, grab a shirt, grab a jacket, and be reasonably assured that you won’t look insane.
Get a haircut and a pedicure every once in a while. Standardize on one of those little makeup stacks so you can get from the shower to the door in ten minutes but still look human.
Co-parenting is hard, ok. Read and implement “Fair Play Life” by Eve Rodsky. Make time for each other, even if it is just an adult breakfast every once in a while for just the two of you.
Find a babysitter you trust and use them every once in a while.
A needle to thread is finding a few other families where you like the parents and your kids like each other — we have just a handful of examples of these, but they are gold.
Have some friends. Doesn’t need to be a lot. A handful of buddies from work and a handful of friends from college is probably actually enough.
Really. Your house won’t be tidy and you’ll lose some battles about brushing their hair. You’ll also get the biggest hugs and have the privilege of introducing one or more tiny beings to this great wide world of ours.