Toddlers often feel frustration stemming from their inability to have control over their choices in life, leading to parents getting caught up in a battle of wills with their 3 year-olds. Dinnertime dissolves into chaos if the wrong spoon is set out on the table, or story time shreds away into a time-out if the wrong books are selected if the parent or child is working from a feeling of frustration.
So many different annoyances in everyday life can cause frustration: from a bad dream to a bad meal, frustration follows us along a path of further destruction if we don’t rein it in.
It doesn’t matter who started it. It’s the chicken and the egg when it comes to the emotional lives of children and their parents. What one is feeling affects the other. If the 3 year-old child is frustrated over a parents choices for him, the parents actions will often then come from a place of frustration and irritation. If it is instead the parent who brings the negative feelings into play, the child will then carry that burden, eventually giving way to its weight, and may exhibit disobedience, neediness or boldness as a result. Frustration begets frustration. It is a destructive and contagious situation.
For every negative there is a positive. For every night there is a day and a problem is no longer a problem if it is looked upon as an opportunity or a challenge. Frustration stems from wishing things were not as they are. It is a useless emotion that is dissolved when parents and children focus on appreciating all that they have instead.
We learn when we are ready to hear. The present is a gift and story time is a great time for us to remind ourselves of that. Story time is a break, a time to cuddle up, breathe and enjoy each other’s company. Parents and children snuggle together as they share a story, inviting the characters in it to share some time with them as well. Fables are stories that give us that moment of pause, no matter what else may have been going through our minds at the start of story time, fables wind us around a moral lesson we can sink our teeth into. Our morals are right down in our core, and that’s where we need to dive to in order to extinguish some of our more superficial feelings like frustration.
Recommended fables for story time. Fables like the famous Tortoise and the Hare, Ant and the Grasshopper and The Boy Who Cried Wolf by Aesop are what come to mind when talking about the moral lessons that fables impart. The lessons: take it slow and steady, day by day and telling the truth are all valuable ones but don’t necessarily address the source of frustration that can aggravate the behavior of so many 3 year-olds and their parents.
Instead, try a selection of modern fables that can subtly teach appreciation while relieving feelings of frustration.
Beautiful Oops! By Barney Saltzberg is a masterpiece of a board book. The pages are torn, bent, smudged and smeared. These are “mistakes” that are transformed into funny doodles, dramatic animal illustrations and possibilities worth exploring. Empowering anyone who has ever been frustrated by the unexpected, parents and children will smile at this short fable with a powerfully simple message.
Just Enough by Teri Daniels uses haiku type poems to remind us that we are all we will ever need. Similar to Beautiful Oops, Just Enough is really more a parable than a fable because it doesn’t teach its moral lesson by anthropomorphizing animal characters with human attributes. While Beautiful Oops demonstrates its moral lessons with the friendly faces of our animal friends, Just Enough instead sings about how a young child is special because of what he is. A 3 year-old can recognize himself in the story and even in the jolly illustrations while easing through a triumphant day where nothing remarkable happens but everything is special and his role in it is revolutionary.
Did I Ever Tell You How Lucky You Are? By Dr. Seuss. Speaking of revolutionaries, Dr. Seuss made an indelible impression on the American psyche by writing for parents and other adults in a rhyming way that holds its appeal even for children. By pointing out the tedium, frustration and irritation that could explode out of all the people in town that have just as hard a lot in life as you do, Dr. Seuss demolishes feelings of annoyance with a smack down of appreciation.