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Up, Up and Away!
Dealing with Climbing Toddlers By Jennifer Dawn Hans
First your baby crawls and you celebrate his mobility. Then he takes a few wobbly steps and you encourage his developing sense of independence. Finally, he begins to climb and you panic.
All of a sudden, your toddler has added an entire new dimension to his world, and previous efforts to childproof your home suddenly seem impossibly inadequate. Countertops, cabinets and coffee tables are no longer out of reach, and your curious toddler is on an endless mission to explore the fascinating world around and above him.
Kelly Pollard, a mother from Livermore, Calif., knows all about the fear accompanying a child's will to roam. "When my oldest son Bobby was between 14 and 20 months, we went through a nasty climbing phase," she says. "First it was the coffee table, which was very easy to remedy. We just moved it to the garage. Then, he moved on to the kitchen chairs, often pulling them down on himself in the process. There were many bumped heads and bloody lips. Needless to say, the next thing to go were the chairs. I was at a loss when he began climbing the kitchen table, the tops of the couches, even the windowsills. I felt like I had to follow him around all day as his own personal landing pad."
Thankfully, Bobby eventually outgrew his penchant for climbing and has moved on to bigger and better pursuits. But Pollard's younger son turns 1 in the not-so-distant future, and she fears she'll be back on landing-pad duty.
Dr. Andy Spooner, director of general pediatrics at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center, says toddlers come fully equipped with an ingrained desire to climb. "We're primates, which means we see our domain as three-dimensional naturally," Dr. Spooner says. "As adults, we've learned to suppress our desire to move vertically and to stick to a two-dimensional space. But kids see the top of a piece of furniture as a perfectly normal place to spend time."
Contrary to popular belief, this difficult stage usually begins well before a child's second birthday. The proverbial "terrible twos" often kick in about 18 months when a child starts to display an increased activity level and exploding verbal abilities. "Couple all this new stuff with a lack of understanding of the social inhibitors that govern the behavior of other kids, and you have the 'terrible twos,'" Dr. Spooner says.
