u/SergeiAndropov

Delicious, but I am now banned from entering India.

My son is 2.5 years old, and loves to read. He has two full bookshelves for his books, and can spend as much as half an hour (basically forever in toddler time) flipping through them. He knows all his letters and numbers, and likes to read things like license plates and the brand label on his car seat. I generally read to him for 30-60 minutes every weekday and for several hours a day on weekends.

Last month, we used the long weekend to do our second attempt at potty training. We spent a lot of the weekend reading to him, but also a lot of time watching tv because it was a good way to get him to actually sit on the potty long enough to do anything. The potty training was very successful, but he developed a bit of an addiction to screentime, and now asks to watch cartoons several times per day. We've been detoxing him by limiting cartoons to about half an hour a week, and he's slowly getting used to the new limitations. We never let him operate a smart phone or tablet, and have no intention of letting him do so for quite some time.

The day before yesterday, he had a massive tantrum during dinner because we offered him chickpeas, which apparently constituted a war crime. We eventually got him to calm down and eat some applesauce, but he was still pretty emotionally fragile, and about 15 minutes before bedtime, he started asking for cartoons. This lead to another tantrum, which we initially tried to defuse by reading him a book, but he kept shoving it away and saying he wanted to watch cartoons, so that clearly wasn't a viable path forward.

There's a parenting technique called redirection where, instead of giving your toddler a hard "no" (which will result in screaming), you offer them something similar to what they were asking for that's more acceptable to you. I'd already used redirection successfully when I offered him applesauce instead of my preferred meal of chickpeas or his preferred meal of Cheeze-its, and unsuccessfully when we tried reading to him instead of letting him watch cartoons. My initial attempt to redirect the tantrum about cartoons had failed because he was dead set on watching something, so I decided to try redirecting him by letting him watch me play a mobile game for a little while. He settled down, and I ran around collecting flowers, accidentally stumbled into a boss fight, almost died, and went back to collecting flowers. It was a nice little bonding experience, it ended the tantrum, and it was still boring enough for him that he didn't object when I stopped playing and started his bedtime routine. We maintained our limits on cartoons, my son went to bed happy and on time, and my wife and I congratulated ourselves on a job well done.

I thought this was a pretty funny story, especially the part where I had to make a panicked retreat from the boss, so I posted about it yesterday in a parenting sub. You'd think I had run over my son with a lawnmower. I got dozens and dozens of comments accusing me of not reading to my son (which I do, a lot, and had tried, but didn't work), of trying to get my son addicted to gacha gaming (he has no idea what gacha gaming is and has never operated a smart phone or tablet of any kind), of doing things that would make it so he couldn't sleep (I did it specifically to end a pre-bedroom tantrum and then he slept like a log), and of letting screens raise my child (the tantrum was prompted by us limiting his access to cartoons, and, to reiterate, he has never personally operated any kind of electronic device). I eventually turned off notifications and let the commenters have fun talking to themselves, though I did wake up this morning to a very nice DM from someone telling me that the commenters were crazy.

There's a popular post on that same sub right now asking when to introduce toddlers to screens. The general consensus is that two years old is an appropriate time to introduce screens in limited quantities and with close supervision, i.e. exactly what we're doing at exactly the age we're doing it. It really is amazing how the internet's hive mind can turn on a dime.

My son's breakfast, per his request, was a whole wheat waffle and a meat thermometer. He ate the waffle but not the thermometer.

My 2.5 year old got it into his head that we were going to watch cartoons 15 minutes before bedtime, so in order to redirect him, I pulled out my phone and fired up Genshin Impact, on the grounds that it's similar enough to cartoons to satisfy him, but actually interactive and something we could easily stop doing once bedtime arrived. I'd just gotten the character Columbina, and in order to level her up I needed to wander around the mountains collecting flowers. This worked really well, and he offered all kinds of commentary ("She has wings!" She going up the mountain!")

Then I noticed some sort of electric dog monster and decided to show him a fight. Little did I realize that this was apparently some kind of secret nightmare boss that my wife (who plays much more than me) had been trying to find for months. After a good 5-10 minutes of wailing away at it, it was still at over 90% HP, and I'd almost died several times.

And that's how my son learned the word "RETREAT!"

EDIT: It looks like a lot of people here aren't familiar with the concept of redirection! Redirection is a useful parenting technique where you take a child's desire for something problematic (in this case, watching cartoons until midnight) and redirect it toward something that's similar but allowed (in this case, helping dad play a video game, which my son finds significantly less interesting than cartoons). Redirection works best when the thing you're redirecting them towards is similar to the thing they want to do, which is why my initial attempt to distract him by reading to him didn't work. You can even chain redirections together, which I did last night when I redirected him away from the video game by reenacting parts of it with him (there's a character who creates magic jellyfish, and we had fun waving our arms and saying "Jellyfish!") I know it's tempting to draw a hard line in the stand and demand instant compliance with what you want, but sometimes a gentler, more gradual approach works better. In this case, I was able to take a situation that started with a tantrum and turn it into a very smooth bedtime.

I learned this technique from the excellent book How to Talk So Little Kids Will Listen. There's also a ton of information about it on the internet, like here:

https://slumberkins.com/blogs/slumberkins-blog/redirection-techniques-for-children

Source: https://bsky.app/profile/michaeljpatrick.bsky.social/post/3msbqr4qsk22i

Table is from Victor Golla’s otherwise excellent California Indian Languages.

Delicately seasoned ground beef with roasted butternut squash, mixed with a jar of satay sauce from Trader Joe’s. Absolutely delicious, but it looks like what we feed our Pomeranian.

Cleaning a P-trap is allegedly one of the easiest DIY tasks. You unscrew it, clean it, and screw it back in. But every single time I’ve tried it, it’s resulted in some brass fixture that was originally installed by druids in 261 BC crumbling into dust, followed by an expensive visit from an actual plumber. For this sink, it turns out the druids used a non-standard pipe width, meaning that the plumber needs to come back tomorrow with new parts. Which means my son’s eagerly awaited trip to the zoo is cancelled.

I massaged my wounded masculinity by heating up some marinated salmon from Costco and doing some asparagus in the air frier. It turned out pretty well.