To think this is normal toddler behaviour?

[dellacucina]

My 22 month old screams and kicks when she doesn't get her way. She throws food on the floor. She is upset if her food is presented in the wrong way. If you tell her not to do something, she is likely to do it in defiance.

I scold her for some of this and I try not to give in to the tantrums most of the time. I have been making her pick up the food she throws. I'm not really sure what more I can do.

However, my mother seems to think that she is totally out of control and that I am failing as a parent.

Thoughts???

I think our lives would be rather dull if our children were all 'in line'! If they were always well behaved then I wouldn't laugh half as much

My 22 month old is just the same, meltdowns over everything and he carry ons doing whatever he wants despite knowing he isn’t allowed whilst grinning at me

Just to further to confirm others' thoughts, yes, mine does this too. Her new favourite hobby is pouring cups of water on the table, over chairs, on the carpet etc. It's great.

She has selective memory, much like my MIL. She always tells me how she had the perfect sleeper, the perfectly behaved child who would eat anything put in front of him, blah blah blah. Other members of the family remember DH’s younger years quite differently

My DD turned two a couple of months ago and has been challenging ever since....and that’s putting it mildly . It’s totally normal.

Perhaps if you locked her in a cupboard under the stairs or made her go and sweep some chimneys that would harden her up, or showed her programmed of starving children around the world.

OP I think you may have picked up my child by accident still picking peas out of the carpet nearly three hours later

"Everything always has to be about her" - YES! That's NORMAL for toddlers!

Toddlers are by nature self-centered. They don't understand that other people exist beyond them. This is why they can't share.

In other words, your mother is saying that your daughter's developmentally normal behaviour is a problem. Wow.

Totally normal! Terrible twos they say.
My daughter is only 22 weeks and even i know she will most likely be the same when shes a toddler.

You are doing brilliant OP.

LyndorCake: a sheet of plastic has sat in our dining room for over a year now . Makes cleaning easier, but I do look forward to chucking it!

"everything just has to be about her, why cant she just behave"

God I thought exactly this about my own toddlers sometimes.

My MiL had selective memory, bless her. Dh and BiL were always delightful age 2. FiL goes strangely quiet and winces slightly when she comes up with these jewels mind. My mum, on the other hand, was rather more gleeful and you could see her mentally dancing round the kitchen screaming "how the worm has turned" as I dealt with a red-faced screaming child. She would just say "gosh ds2 reminds me so much if you at that age" though.

It's funny how having a child makes you look at your own mother in a different way (and sometimes makes you wonder how you survived your own childhood!). My moment was my mother snapping "oh, don't be such a wimp" at my 10 month old DD who'd started to cry because she'd fallen over for the first time.

Also, my mother was complaining recently that DD (now aged 2) was being ridiculous and illogical because she's jealous of her baby cousin. Apparently a two year old should be capable of the thought process: "I like mummy but I like other people as well, so mummy is capable of liking my baby cousin without it taking anything away from her love for me" . Yeah, because that's how two year olds think!

It's called terrible twos for a reason.

We have the opposite to you.My parents and inlaws think she is a delight who is totally easy and no work at all compared to us as children. Maybe we were all little shits but they seem to block out any of the hard behaviour and think my child is a permanent delight.

To be fair to them (and her) she has slept brilliantly from 6 weeks, is quite emotionally mature, has empathy and generally is quite nice. But, like any other child she can have mega tantrums, be very strong willed and can be hard work because she’s like the Duracell bunny and needs lots of active play otherwise she’d be climbing the walls. What I do miss though is for about 4 months her tantrums were silent. She’d just go and place herself in child’s pose, compose herself and then pop up when she was ready. I don’t know where she got that from but I hope they return. That was quite nice compared to the screams we get now.

I think certain people over a certain age have a selective memory regarding children and childhood. According to my MIL both her children never cried, were potty trained by two, ate everything and barely made a noise. Yet my DH remembers always been told to keep the noise down and witnessed his sister's spectacular tantrums being 5 years older. An elderly neighbour told me she's was reading and writing before starting school - so that must have been 3. I told her that back in the day school started after 5th birthday and not every child went to nursery. She insisted she was Sylvia Plath at three and children today are lazy and spoiled. She doesn't have children of her own.

Toddler sounds normal.

penisbeakers Here in Sweden it's called the terrible threes

Yeah normal. I think it was about that age that DD could only be given one morsel of food at a time as anything else got launched. She'll be 3 in December and she still has her moments (like screaming "No mummy!" in my face then trying to slap me when I was putting her to bed last night... )
She's lovely most of the time but they're learning and testing boundaries.