Some toddlers are just calmer than others?

YANBU.
Of course they are.
dcs 1 + 2 were chalk and cheese.

dc1 - king of the tantrums, from about 14months through until about 7 yrs old.
dc2 - just never really bothered. Don't remember a single one.

OTOH
dc1 - would eat anything, and plenty of it
dc2 - fussy as a fuss pot in food refusing land.

When you have a child that is a "good......" (insert eater, sleeper, talker, etc etc) it is pretty natural and normal to congratulate yourself on your great parenting. I suspect we've all been there. Then either dc2 comes along and is the complete opposite, or they just head into the next 'phase' and bite another child at Nursery or something, and you realise that - whereas the way you deal with some things can sometimes help - ultimately, you have the baby / toddler you have and much comes from within them.

Definitely. My daughter is 2 and 9 months. She doesn’t tantrum much at all. She’s definitely sassy and knows her own mind, but thankfully major tantrums are not often at all.

Last week she actually stamped her foot because I said no to a second ice cream. It was hard not to laugh to be honest!! I definitely think I’ve been lucky.

It’s a mixture of nature and nurture ime.

In other news, bears shit in the woods.

The brutal toddler years of DS1 were finally explained some years later when he had his autism diagnosis. From 10m he'd look at you, scream and smash his head on the floor when told "no". I'm not quite sure when the seamless transition from toddler to teenager took place. As he's become articulate, some things now make sense, such as parks that he viserally hated turning out to be because he mixed park name A with features of park B, so always felt disappointed that we were at the "wrong" park.

DS2 (thank goodness) was a much happier soul. But energetic. So energetic. One of my parkrun course bests still stands from those days as I had to be ready to sprint at any oppportunity. Possibly climbing a tree to guide him down.

I'd often be faced with a choice of deal with the screamer or the bolter. I tended to leave the screamer to it and trust that he was pretty unappealling to any passing opportunist abductors (and had a fine set of teeth he was willing to use in self-defense) and chase the bolter as he was more likely to get himself into danger. It was a safe bet that the screamer would still be in the same spot pummeling himself towards Australia when I returned.

No amount of chirruping about little mouse voices would have dealt with them. DS1 would likely just scream to stop the syruppy wittering anyway, and DS2 would have been out of earshot in seconds. Frankly I wouldn't blame them for that

Yup, they have different personalities in my experience.

Agree. People want to use every explanation in the book to think or say otherwise.

Agree and I know it's not the exact same but similar situation with dog/puppies.

Video: "how I taught my 14 week old to heel"

[30 second clip of young puppy heeling]

poster then proceeds to act and imply that puppy does this all the time now with this magic thing she did / her excellent training skills.

When in reality, it was 30 second clip, the puppy does NOT walk like that for hours, (especially when a distraction comes the other way) and it was a tiny snapshot when it happened to work not representative of all the time every day.

That's just one example. But I feel these stupid videos robbed me of my time with my puppy when she was small because I spent the whole time worrying and stressing if I was a bad owner because my dog couldn't unload the dishwasher and make the sodding tea by six months.

rant over. Sorry I had to use a dog as comparison but I don't have children. The damage is the same kind though.

my sister, who also had a puppy the same time as me didn't have trouble with this because she has three children and knows these TikTok parents are full of shit 😂 (and by extension TikTok dog owners)

Mine didn’t have temper tantrums. Literally not one.

o can assure you not wasn’t some kind of magic parenting I processed - I was muddling along like everyone else!

Agree mostly it’s who they are.

Yes! All staff at the maternity told me DS2 was such a serene calm baby. He's 12 and still is.

Absolutely 1000% and unless you’ve had a difficult one you’ve absolutely no idea.

my first was impossible! She was a ball of rage who would shake, lash out, get herself so worked up she would vomit. She was a rabid animal and there was honestly no parenting trick or tactic that made any difference. You had to let her burn out which could take an hour or longer, and I mean of pure screaming meltdowns, then she would collapse exhausted.

my current 2 yo, if I point my finger at him, it’s enough to stop him in his tracks, he cries for about 2 seconds, then wants a cuddle and gets on with his day. If I just had him, I would think kids were easy.

Haha, spot on! Luckily I never became a smug mum but rather a surprised one when DS2 turned out to be the most calm little boy you can imagine. Especially after the tornado DS1 this was very refreshing. And... it also reassured me that my parenting skills had nothing to do with their innate personnality!

I’m sure I’m going to get slammed for this, but I genuinely believe it’s what they’re fed and what they eat. There’s so much we still don’t know about the effects of different foods. UPF has a huge impact on mind, body and soul.

Children are definitely born with their own personalities. Any of us who are parents will know that our child had their character from the day they were born ;)

Absolutely. DD (my 3rd and final child) was the worse for tantrums by far. She was such a stubborn toddler, 45 mins of kicking and screaming and you didn’t dare go near her. If she had an afternoon nap, I had to let her wake naturally as she was a horror if still tired and woken early. My mum commented once that ‘there is something wrong with this child’! I do think she is possibly on the spectrum, but this has only become apparent to her dad and I in the last 2yrs and it was picked up as a possibility in a health appt so hoping to get it confirmed before uni next year.

Anyway, she is 17 now, and when I tell people about the tantrums they cannot believe it. She has never so much said a single negative word to me during her teen years. She is not a teen who will shout and scream and slam doors. She will silently retreat to her room, and not come out for some time if upset. DS (21) is the same, and I do think its a mix of personality, but also the fact I am very chilled and never raise my voice or stress out over day to day things. I don’t think i’m any kind of super parent by any stretch, as i’m really not, but I do think at toddler age it’s largely just their personality, and some are much more chilled than others.

Of course - children aren’t born like a blank slate, they come out with a personality, and although as a parent you can help bring the best out (or conversely, make them worse) it’s not as simple as nature OR nurture, it’s both.
Every human is slightly different and some people are “go with the flow” types, whereas others thrive with routine and boundaries.

Of course they are...

But it is also quite impossible to separate most of it between natural and parental causes. It will be a bit of both, but how much is down to less than optimal parenting, and how much is down to genetics/physical/mental/personality aspects of your toddler, is always up for debate.

As a small side point though, defending differences by saying "I had 2-3 kids and they are different" doesn't work, because those 3 children didn't grow up in the same environment. Parents change after having their first child because they are much more experienced, and the second child obviously has to navigate life with an ever-present older sibling, that the first didn't have to deal with, whereas the first has the influence of a baby etc. Very significant early environmental differences... it is hard therefor to say that the differences between them are all natural, and not from these environmental changes.

My eldest was a total twat when he hit toddlerhood, my 2nd born was the most placid laidback kid in the universe. DD was easy too.
It's all about personality and as I told my eldest when he had his DDs, your trainee parenting happens on your eldest. By the time you get to no.2 and beyond you are far more adaptable.
Just my experience.

Absolutely! The toddlers in my family can tantrum for England. People marrying into the family should be warned this is a thing. They grow out of it, maybe because of our amazing parenting

Every single person on this planet is slightly different. We all have different temperaments and also different upbringings. The age old argument of 'nature vs nurture' comes into play here although personally I think someone's personality is just how they are and external factors won't bare much on that. Parenting does come into it but more so in the case of said child becoming able to be a functioning human adult at a later date. Kids are kids, they operate in mysterious ways! I would love to see inside my kids heads and see what their thought processes are! Older one is mental and younger one is dead calm (although classically you hear of it being the other way around and the first being quieter and calmer than the second!!)

I had an absolute nightmare of a toddler in dd1😆 impulsive and bitey. No sense of danger. She is a delightful teenager now! Though she still has a naughty glint in her eye! Ds on the other hand was very placid and no tantrums ever but possibly due to this, he struggled with nursery. He just wanted calm. He's relaxed still now though at 11. I did nothing different with them.

They’re all different and just because toddlers might appear calm, unless you see them 24 hrs a day you don’t know.

Tantrums aren’t a big deal and are perfectly age appropriate for a toddler. Both my dc were early talkers so we didn’t have too many tantrums. When they did we knew all about it though

Definitely. My first was hard work. My second very easy until she turned 4.

All my kids are completely different i have 3 one is the calmest most laid back person you would ever meet i dont know i have him. Another one is an angel until she hears the word no then all hell breaks loose. Then the 3rd one very clingy very nervous and very emotional. They where all parented pretty much the same.

Yes I agree OP. I had two calm DC and then DC3's mission in life was to teach me not to be a smug parent!

Videos like this annoy me.

I get that (most) people making them are coming from a good place and trying to share some help/advice about what works for them and their child but you need to remember that it’s all staged.
I don’t mean staged as in the 2 year old in the video is acting but the parent obviously sets up recording their child when they’re having a tantrum/meltdown (weird in itself to video them during such a vulnerable time IMO but anyway…) and then they try these calming ‘tips’.
They then post the video of the time it did work. They don’t post the 30+ other videos of the times it didn’t work….
Also, there could be lots of reasons some children calm more quickly than others. Like you say, your child had a speech delay so was likely far more frustrated than a child his age without a speech delay.
Plus, at the end of the day, toddlers are humans too! And all humans are different. There are adults who are more ‘hot headed’ than others or there are those who could calm more quickly from certain situations than others for example.
Each child is different and everyone parents differently, you know what works and what doesn’t for your child and that’s all that matters (: