Toddlers Topics

For infants and toddlers learning and living are the same thing. If they feel secure, treasured, loved, their own energy and curiosity will bring them new understanding and new skills.
—Amy Laura Dombro (20th century)

In the range of things toddlers have to learn and endlessly review—why you can’t put bottles with certain labels in your mouth, why you have to sit on the potty, why you can’t take whatever you want in the store, why you don’t hit your friends—by the time we got to why you can’t drop your peas, well, I was dropping a few myself.
—Mary Kay Blakely (20th century)

Bad child care is the nightmare from which no mother can escape. The professional who can run a business or save a life . . . the mother who can organize a community fund-raiser while entertaining two toddlers and nursing a baby—no matter how thoroughly they’ve investigated a nanny, no matter how many years they’ve known their sitter, all walk out the door haunted by the specter that the sitter or staff member to whom they’ve entrusted their most precious responsibility is a Hyde masquerading as a Jekyll, or otherwise not the women they thought her to be.
—Melinda M. Marshall (20th century)