Tag: Change

From Baby to Toddler: Developmental Thresholds and Complex Emotions

DEVELOPMENTAL THRESHOLDS

Babies are constantly changing. Even before birth, their development during pregnancy is rapid and constant. And yet, we perceive this development as occurring in stages. Some of these stages seem arbitrary – like the trimesters of pregnancy – and some seem practical – like the motor milestones. The change from one stage to the next requires adaptation and often comes with excitement, pride, mourning, and anxiety.

Often, these thresholds feel sudden because we mark them with a discrete event – conception, birth, first time our baby sleeps through the night, first time they eat solid foods, first tooth, first step, first word. But really, these are indicators of progress that is slow and constant.

This focus on a discrete event is where we get into trouble. The more sudden a change from one stage to the next feels, the more trouble we have adapting and the more our emotions around this change can feel overwhelming.

Motor development especially can seem to happen in sudden leaps. If that is our focus, we can fall into the pattern of waiting for the next leap to happen, trying to help our baby get there faster, and even becoming anxious if the space between leaps is taking ‘too long’. But if we pay attention to other areas of development, we see them progressing more quickly during that space between gross motor leaps – fine motor control, perceptual abilities, social interaction, language ability, sleeping skills, and eating skills.

So when we take a holistic global view, development doesn’t happen in chunks with discrete moments marking one section to the next but gradually and globally. We can define our child’s ‘stages’ in whatever way is most meaningful to us. And the thresholds between stages are more like the changing of seasons than the flip of a switch.

COMPLEX AND CONFLICTING EMOTIONS

Often, thresholds or transitions from one stage to the next cause lots of complex and conflicting emotions. We are excited to see our baby learn new things and delight in their excitement and wonder (such as learning how to turn pages in a book). We are proud of how far they’ve come and how our bond with them is manifesting. But we also mourn the loss of the things we enjoyed about the previous stage that we will never get back (such as being able to cuddle and read a book without them grabbing it, chewing it, or tearing it). And we can feel anxious about adapting to, managing, or guiding them through the next stage of development (such as how to stop them from damaging books while still encouraging their interest in them and promoting literacy).

Sometimes, the mourning especially feels big and overwhelming to the point that you wonder if there’s something wrong with you (such as yearning for the days when your baby was soft and tiny and squishy and stayed where you put them). In these moments, I have tried to identify what it was about the previous stage that I feel I am losing and look for how that same experience or form of connection is showing up in my baby’s new way of being or interacting (such as encouraging my baby to come to me when they need me or getting down on the floor to play with them on their level).

As with all endings of one stage and beginnings of the next, the closer you look at them and pay attention to the details of the experience, the more they seem to overlap. The ‘moment’ when one thing ends and another begins starts to look more like a process. This zooming in helps me smooth out the emotional experience as well.

It means I am not mourning everything at once but in small pieces as the changes occur. I can then more easily stay focused on the exciting new aspects of my baby’s development and our life together. I can be proud of the small victories as well as the big ones.

I can also see the smaller pieces of the change as they occur and adapt in real time instead of feeling like something has suddenly shifted that I wasn’t ready for. In this way, I avoid a lot of the anxiety that comes from a sudden loss of feeling competent, a loss of control, and the feeling of my baby growing up too fast for me to keep up. There will definitely be times when things do shift suddenly – an illness or injury for example. And maybe I will have to learn a completely different way of dealing with those. But for the more predictable shifts that happen as my baby grows into a toddler, I have found this ‘focus on the details’ approach to work well.

WHEN DOES MY BABY BECOME A TODDLER?

The standardized moment when a baby becomes a toddler is their first birthday. This is an example of an arbitrary and sudden way to mark this threshold. For us, this time corresponds with the end of my parental leave and the start of daycare. Their first birthday is also the first anniversary of their birth and all the emotional memories that come with that. We are also in the process of weaning bottle feeding and our baby is rapidly working their way to taking their first steps.

These related yet varied developmental and life changes all feel like part of the process of my baby becoming a toddler. So while their first birthday may be the definitive moment that the label flips over, the emotional processing of this developmental change incorporates so much more.

PROCESSING THE THRESHOLD FROM BABY TO TODDLER

The threshold between baby and toddler isn’t the first time in parenting that I’ve experienced complex and conflicting emotions, and it definitely won’t be the last, but it feels particularly big.

Some of the changes around this threshold involve the ending of something that has been a constant for us since their birth a year ago or very close thereafter (bottle feeding, parental leave and full time caregiving). These aspects have been core elements that defined our existence up until now. Progressing past them to move on to the next phase feels like we’re giving up parts of what defines us as a family. Or what has defined our experience as a family up until now.

The end of parental leave is like pushing our way out of our family cocoon (reinforced by the pandemic-induced isolation) and re-entering the world, now as a family of three. It feels vulnerable and shaky. It feels like there will be monumental distance between us after spending almost every day together.

Their first birthday is an opportunity to reflect on all our memories and experiences, growth and change from this first year. It will also bring back a lot of emotional memories from our experiences of labour, birth, and immediate postpartum.

The end of bottle feeding feels like the end of early morning cuddles and a clear step from the baby-drinking-from-a-baby-bottle phase into the toddler-drinking-from-their-own-cup phase.

There is so much development in so many different areas around this time but the one that gets the most attention is walking. A baby’s first steps are often much celebrated and, emotionally, mark the shift into toddlerhood. The name ‘toddler’ even comes from the unsteady, wide based gait quintessential to new, young ambulators. But this ‘milestone’ especially feels like a long slow process as I’ve watched my baby go from sitting to pulling up to stand, crawling, cruising, kneeling, bear-crawling, standing, balancing, reaching, and soon, taking steps, then walking. And even then, it will be a while before they give up crawling altogether.

So overall, there is a shift towards my child becoming more independent, spending more time away from me, and a re-defining of our experience as a family from one that exists in isolation to one that exists integrated with the wider world. Clearly, my baby is not the only one making a shift to a new stage. We all will be shifting together.

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Trans Wisdom: The Power of Community

COMMUNITY HAS EXPERIENCIAL KNOWLEDGE

Many things in life, including transitioning, are difficult, complex, and not well understood by the general public. Navigating these experiences is difficult in part because there is so little information available about what to expect, what to avoid, and what resources are available and helpful.

Communities are full of people who have gone there before you. They have way more knowledge and information that is tried, tested, and true than any professional or google search can provide. The bigger the community, the wider the range of experiences and suggestions you will find and the more likely you will find something that works for you.

Without the local trans community, we would not have known that ‘the proper referral process’ that our family doctor was following was outdated and incorrect. We would not have found a doctor willing to follow the current referral process to prescribe my husband Testosterone. We would not have had personal recommendations for where to go for surgery. We would not have had scripts to use when encountering resistance at various governmental and private institutions when trying to change his name and gender marker on documentation. We would not have had scripts to use when acquaintances, friends, and family asked inappropriate, invasive, or poorly worded questions. We would not have been prepared for how long the waitlist was for specialist referrals needed to complete paperwork.

So much of what we learned about how to navigate my husband’s transition came from our community. Without the community, we would have struggled significantly more, waited for specialists that were not required, and felt incredibly alone.

COMMUNITY PROVIDES SUPPORT

We need support from a variety of sources when we are going through something difficult and big. Support from a broader community is one of those sources. Being part of a community of people that are all experiencing something similar normalizes the experience and provides validation.

Often, when our experiences are rarely or poorly represented in mainstream media, we are left feeling like we are the only ones going through this. This can lead to questioning whether your experience is legitimate, whether your reactions to this experience are valid, whether you should be dealing with it differently or better, or whether you’re doing the right thing. We can feel lost, isolated, confused, self-conscious, fearful, anxious, and angry. We can internalize the judgements and negative responses from those around us, including what is represented in mainstream media.

While having a community won’t automatically make the experience an easy, positive one, it will show us that there are others out there struggling and thriving in similar circumstances to our own. Seeing someone else describe their own experience in the same way we would, navigating the same barriers and systems, struggling with similar emotions, tells us that our experience is shared, normal, and valid. We find voices other than our own to counteract the negativity and judgement that we have internalized.

Normalization and validation of our experiences doesn’t take away the difficult aspects, but it helps fortify us against the toll that those parts of our experience can take on us. It helps us weather them. Community gives us someone to talk to who will respond with positivity, understanding, and support without us having to first explain our experience to them from the beginning.

COMMUNITY MEMBERS HAVE IMPLICIT UNDERSTANDING

People who share our experiences will automatically understand our struggles, milestones, and achievements. This is huge. If you need support, even just an ‘aw that sucks’ or ‘I hear you’, and you share your point of struggle with someone outside your community, instead of support you might get a blank stare, a confused look, a platitude, or an inappropriate question. In order to get the response you’re looking for you would have to explain your situation from the beginning, often sharing a lot of personal information in order to bring them up to speed, and may not ever get them to the point of understanding enough to provide the support you need.

I repeated this process many, many times over the course of my husband’s transition. I spent more energy in the explanation than I received in whatever support I got back. The more marginalized your experience is, the less likely it will be that you will automatically get the response you’re looking for. I found a huge difference between the support I got when I had a miscarriage vs the support I got when my husband was transitioning (and we were struggling against systemic barriers).

It was always such a relief when we could tell a group of trans people about something that had happened and immediately get the response we were hoping for, be it support, commiseration, information, or celebration, without having to provide any explanation or background. I learned through trial and error when it was worth explaining my situation to non-community members and when to keep my struggles and triumphs to myself until I had community to share it with.

COMMUNITY HELPS US CELEBRATE

I didn’t realize how important this function of community was until I had something to celebrate and got a response from non-community members that was sympathetic or blank instead of excited. It really takes away from the positive experience when someone assumes it’s negative and you have to explain the whole backstory before they conceptually get it. Even then, they don’t really feel excited for you.

But members of your community do. They have celebrated the same things or are looking forward to the moment when they can. They understand how hard it was to get there. They understand why that milestone is worth celebrating. Without community, the milestone passes you by with a small blip of excitement, self-satisfaction, accomplishment, pride, relief, and perhaps some apprehension about what comes next. But when you get to celebrate with community, your milestone is celebrated by so many others that it is magnified. It becomes a bright moment in a timeline of struggle that you can look back on to give you strength when you need it.

Being able to celebrate the high moments with people that understand can shift our perspective of the entire experience. It can shift the focus from the struggle and loss to the achievement, hope, and success. The story of our experience, when we look back on it, is now characterized by the moments we celebrated with the community. They shine so brightly that they overpower the dark parts between them. They don’t erase the struggle but when the experience if viewed from farther away, they stand out as the most important parts. They make the rest of the experience worth it.

COMMUNITIES HAVE LOUDER VOICES

The voice of the many is often louder than the voice of the few. The more marginalized your experience is, the more powerful the effect of the community. These are also the experiences that get the least attention from media, politicians, health care, and research. Community is necessary to amplify our voices to share our experiences and gain access to the resources and services we need.

The members of a community often have a wide range of outside expertise, connections, and influence. So not only do they have a louder voice, but they can often find a way to get their message heard by the right people with a lot less effort than a single person might.

Communities can form organizations, develop a funding base, and develop their own resources. They can hold fundraisers that are coordinated across an entire country. They can pool their resources from multiple sites and put them towards something that no one person from the community would be able to change.

Feeling like your voice is being heard and that you helped to change the system so that the next person to go through a similar experience will have a slightly easier time of it than you did is huge.

What experience have you had where being a member of a community made a big impact on you or the wider world? What other ways did being a member of a community impact you? Leave a comment below or send me an email!

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