Terrible Twos, Who is to Blame?

I’m not quite sure who coined the phrase “The Terrible Twos,” but whoever they were, I don’t think they had it quite right. Recently, I’ve been having some problems with my eight year old. I know not two year old? But after much struggling about what to do about her behavior, I remembered something that came to me as she was entering that “terrible twos” phase of her life. 
 

For those of you with children, I’m sure you remember that first year or two of their little lives? Remember how you put them to bed, put them down to play, put them in their highchair and fed them their little meals? We did all of these things when we wanted to and how we wanted to. We controlled every aspect of their precious lives. Then one day we woke up and found these little monsters who didn’t want to do anything we wanted them to, right? When this started happening to me, I realized that she wasn’t the one to blame (okay, not all the time anyway), I was the one who was going through the terrible twos.
 

I was experiencing my own loss of control over this tiny creature who I had taken complete care of for almost two years. I didn’t want to give up the control of deciding what she wore, when she ate and where she played. Just this realization alone made this stage much easier for both of us. As I learned to give up some control, she became much easier to deal with. It seems as the terrible twos faded into her past and I forgot that valuable lesson.
 

But here I am, like most parents, worrying tirelessly. I lie in bed at night and wonder why she’s getting in trouble at school. I beat myself up for not knowing what to do to make things better and go through every scenario in my mind of how to control the situation. Control, there’s the problem. I realized that we are going through another phase of her little life when I am losing yet a little more control. Then I remembered what my job as a parent really is. My job is to teach her to make her own decisions and pray that they are good decisions.
 

For all of the control we have over these creatures when they are handed to us, we must understand that that control is something that has to diminish a little every day and every year or they will not become the people we want them to become one day. We must teach them how to make choices not tell them what to choose. If we do not give up some control and teach them this, we are the ones stuck in the terrible twos, not our children. They will continue to grow out of our control and we will be the ones left angry and pitching temper tantrums and in the end, the ones to blame.