Jordan Mitchell Facebook ad: “Read this if your toddler seems insane”

About this ad

Meta Ad Library ID

819018717843128

Platforms

Facebook, Instagram, Audience Network, Messenger and Threads

Relaunches

1

Niche

Parenting & Kids

How we count

Ad text

I hate my best friend's daughter. She is SO calm and makes me question what I'm doing wrong as a mom. "Are other people's toddlers really this calm, or am I being fooled?" I typed that into my phone at 11:40 on a Tuesday night, sitting on the bathroom floor because it was the only room in the house where nobody could find me. I had spent the afternoon at my best friend's kitchen table. Our girls are eleven weeks apart. We were making play dough. And her daughter sat down on the floor and scooped flour into a cup, and then scooped it back out, and then did it again, and she did this for thirty full minutes without looking up once. I know it was thirty minutes because I watched the clock on her microwave the entire time. My daughter made snow angels in the flour. She screamed when I picked her up. She hit me in the collarbone with a wooden spoon and then laughed, and my friend said "oh she's just spirited" in that voice people use, and I laughed too, and I drove home and I did not say one word about it to my husband. Here is what I have never told anybody. It is not that I want a quiet child. I don't. I love that she is loud. I love that she climbs things she should not climb. It is that I sat in that kitchen and I watched another woman's daughter concentrate, and a very small voice in the back of my head said: "she is doing something you aren't." And I have been trying to make that voice shut up for four months. Because I know what I do. Around three o'clock, when the whining starts and my patience is a thin wire, I hand her the tablet. And she goes quiet. Instantly. Her face goes slack and her thumb moves and the house becomes survivable, and I get to unload the dishwasher and answer two emails and breathe. And then I turn it off. And she becomes a person I do not recognize. I have heard other mothers describe this. One of them called it zombie mode. Another one said her son "can't watch ten minutes of Paw Patrol without becoming a monster tornado for the next few hours." That is exactly right. That is the phrase. A monster tornado, and it arrives about ninety seconds after the screen goes dark, and it is not a tantrum about the screen. She is not asking for it back. She is on the floor because I put her cup down on the left side of her plate instead of the right, and she cannot come back from that, and neither can I. And I stand there and I think "I did this." I think it in the grocery store when she goes wet noodle in the checkout line and forty people watch me drag her past the gum. I think it when a stranger looks at me a beat too long. I think it in the car afterward, both of us crying, and I hate myself in a way I do not have language for. And the terrible part, the part nobody says out loud, is that I am not even allowed to say any of this. Because you cannot admit you give your kid too much screen time. Not now. Not out loud. There is a whole internet of women in linen aprons filming their toddlers doing quiet work at a little wooden table, and there is a comment section underneath waiting to tell you what you have done to your child's developing brain. So we lie. All of us. A preschool teacher wrote something once that I have not been able to forget. She said parents would brag to her that they had no TV in the house, no screens at all. And then she would set her phone down and their kid would swipe it open to YouTube in twelve seconds flat. She said "a lot of people lie when they feel shamed." I lie. When the pediatrician's form asks how many hours, I write down one, and the real number is closer to three, and I write down one because I cannot bear to see her face when she reads it. That was where I was in March. Lying on a form. Hiding in a bathroom. Watching my best friend's daughter scoop flour and understanding, with total certainty, that something was wrong with me. So I want to tell you what happened at the two year checkup, because it broke something open. I had the form in my lap and I was doing the math on the screen time line, and Dr. Nguyen, who has maybe eight minutes for us and always feels rushed, sat down and did not look at the form at all. She asked me how I was doing. And I made a joke, the way you do, about how my kid is feral and my friend's kid is a Montessori advertisement, and how I have clearly ruined everything. She did not laugh. She said, "That's not what's happening." I said something like, well, she's just wired that way, some kids are calm, some kids aren't. And she said, "Sure. Temperament is real. Your daughter is probably always going to be the loud one at the party." And I remember feeling something loosen in my chest, because a doctor had just told me it wasn't my fault. Then she said "But that's not what you're describing. You're not describing a loud kid. You're describing a kid who can't tolerate a small frustration. Those are different things. One of them is who she is. The other one is a skill, and skills are built." And I said I didn't understand. So she explained it, and I have repeated this explanation to probably nine people since, because it is the only thing anybody has ever said to me that made the last two years make sense. A toddler's brain, she said, is building one specific piece of machinery right now. It is called inhibitory control. It is the thing that lets a person want something, and not get it, and stay in one piece anyway. It is the difference between disappointment and a meltdown. Every human being has to build it, and it gets built the same way a muscle does. Through resistance. Here is what she meant. When your daughter picks up a wooden puzzle piece and it doesn't fit, and she turns it, and it still doesn't fit, and she turns it again, she is in a state of small, tolerable frustration. Her brain is holding the goal in mind, resisting the urge to throw the piece, and trying another angle. That is the rep. That is inhibitory control being built, one turn of a wooden puzzle piece at a time. Now hand her a tablet. A tablet has been engineered, by people who are extremely good at their jobs, to remove every single one of those moments. It anticipates her. It rewards her before she asks. There is never a piece that does not fit. The gap between wanting something and getting it has been closed to zero, deliberately, because that is what makes it profitable. She looked at me and she said the sentence I have not stopped thinking about. "It's not making her worse. It's just not making her better. And she only gets so many hours." That was it. That was the whole thing. It was never that I was a bad mother. It was that I was handing my daughter an object specifically designed to make sure she never had to practice the exact skill she was failing at. Three hours a day, every day, of the muscle not being used. And then I was standing in a checkout line, genuinely confused about why she could not hold herself together when the gum was on the wrong shelf. My best friend's daughter is not calmer than mine. My best friend's daughter has had more reps. I drove home from that appointment and I was not ashamed. I was furious. Not at myself. At the fact that nobody had ever bothered to explain this to me, that I had absorbed two years of guilt about "how many hours" when the actual question was "what happens inside those hours." Because here was my real problem, and I'm guessing if you're still reading you've dealt with this too. I cannot just take the screen away. There is no version of my afternoon where I remove the tablet and replace it with nothing. I have dinner to make. I have a job. Some of you have a newborn on your chest right now and a two year old at your feet, and I want to say directly to you that you are not weak. What I needed was something that occupies twenty minutes the way the screen occupies twenty minutes, and does the opposite thing to her brain while it does it. I tried the sensory bins. Rice went into the vents. I am still finding it to this day lol. I tried the wooden latch board my mother in law gave us. And this is the part that took me the longest to understand. She loved it. For six days. And then she could open every latch, and she did it once to prove it, and she never touched it again. Because a latch has two states. Open and shut. Once she solved it, there was nothing left in it. It was a puzzle she had finished. The thing that finally worked was a soft cloth book. Felt pages. Buckles and zippers and laces and little pieces she has to move and match and hide and find. And what makes it different from the latch board is that it does not have an ending. Every page is layered. When she solves the buttons, the buttons become the easy part, and now she is doing something harder on the same page. Threading. Sorting. Making a small story out of the pieces. The difficulty comes up to meet her. There is always one more thing on the page that she cannot quite do yet, which means there is always one more rep. That is the entire point. Not just some activities she conquers and abandons. A page that keeps handing her small, tolerable frustrations, over and over, for twenty minutes, while I make dinner. The first day, she did four minutes and threw it. I want to be honest about that because I am tired of women pretending. The second week, I looked up from the stove and she had been on the floor for nineteen minutes, working a zipper, tongue out the side of her mouth, and I stood there with a wooden spoon in my hand and my eyes went hot and I felt like an idiot for crying about a zipper. She still screams. She is still the loud one. Nothing about her temperament changed, and I would not want it to. But something else is different, and it took me a while to see it, because it does not look like anything. It looks like her dropping a block and picking it back up. It looks like the checkout line with the gum on the wrong shelf, and her face going red, and her breathing, and then not falling apart. It looks like nothing at all, which is exactly what it is supposed to look like. Three weeks ago my friend came over. Same kitchen table, my house this time. And her daughter and mine sat on the floor together and both of them worked on that book, and my friend said, offhand, without any idea what she was doing to me, "God, she's gotten so focused." I went into the kitchen and put my hands on the counter and just started to cry. I am not going to pretend that a cloth book fixed my life because it did not. My daughter is two and a half and she is a hurricane and I still hide sometimes.| But it did give me some peace when I needed it, and it also has stopped my daughter from melting down as much. If you are a toddler mom you know how valuable that can be. You are not doing anything wrong. Your child is not broken and neither are you. She has just never been given the reps, because the thing you handed her to survive the afternoon was built, on purpose, to make sure she never had to try. You can give them back to her. It takes twenty minutes a day and it does not require you to be a better person than you already are. Thank you for reading my story. For anyone interested, I will leave a link here to the book that my daughter still uses to this day. https://shopveloragoods.com/products/velora%E2%84%A2-montessori-busy-board Obviously check it out for yourself, but I wanted to let the internet know what a blessing this brand has been for me and my family.

Where the ad sends people

shopveloragoods.com

Read this if your toddler seems insane 👉

Velora