The Happiest Toddler on the Block: The New Way to Stop the Daily Battle of Wills and Raise a Secure and Well-Behaved One- to Four-Year-Old

Toddlers can drive you bonkersso adorable and fun one minuteso stubborn and demanding the next! Yet, as unbelievable as it sounds, there is a way to turn the daily stream of nos and donts into yeses and hugsif you know how to speak your toddlers language. In one of the most useful advances in parenting techniques of the past twenty-five years, Dr. Karp reveals that toddlers, with their immature brains and stormy outbursts, should be thought of not as pint-size people but as pintsizecavemen.

Having noticed that the usual techniques often failed to calm crying toddlers, Dr. Karp discovered that the key to effective communication was to speak to them in their own primitive language. When he did, suddenly he was able to soothe their outbursts almost every time! This amazing success led him to the realization that children between the ages of one and four go through four stages of evolutionary growth, each linked to the development of the brain, and each echoing a step in prehistoric humankinds journey to civilization:

The Charming Chimp-Child (12 to 18 months): Wobbles around on two legs, grabs everything in reach, plays a nonstop game of monkey see monkey do.
The Knee-High Neanderthal (18 to 24 months): Strong-willed, fun-loving, messy, with a vocabulary of about thirty words, the favorites being no and mine.
The Clever Caveman (24 to 36 months):
Just beginning to learn how to share, make friends, take turns, and use the potty.
The Versatile Villager (36 to 48 months): Loves to tell stories, sing songs and dance, while trying hard to behave.

To speak to these children, Dr. Karp has developed two extraordinarily effective techniques:
1) The fast food rulerestating what your child has said to make sure you got it right;
2) The four-step ruleusing gesture, repetition, simplicity, and tone to help your
irate Stone-Ager be happy again.

Once youve mastered toddler-ese, you will be ready to apply behavioral techniques specific to each stage of your childs development, such as teaching patience and calm, doing time-outs (and time-ins), praise through gossiping, and many other strategies. Then all the major challenges of the toddler yearsincluding separation anxiety, sibling rivalry, toilet training, night fears, sleep problems, picky eating, biting and hitting, medicine taking can be handled in a way that will make your toddler feel understood. The result: fewer tantrums, less yelling, and, best of all, more happy, loving time for you and your child.


From the Hardcover edition.