Graham has been interested in numbers for a while - counting everything from his toys to the eggs in the fridge, asking what numbers are on different book pages, and occasionally yelling addition problems from the toilet (really, that’s what you’re thinking about right now?!). Around the corner from us is a S.A.M. (a math enrichment center), so I signed him up for an assessment. The assessor noted he still needed to work on pencil grip and number formation, but he had a great attitude, and sure, they’d love to have him. Given his interest, we signed up.

The class, which we’ve been calling “math camp,” meets for an hour each week. Graham is 4 and attends a play-based preschool, so I’ll admit to some hesitation about something this formal and academic. But the refund policy was generous, so away we went.

Each week, there’s an independent practice booklet to complete at home if so inclined. Yesterday, I asked Graham to work on his booklet after quiet time, during snack - a time I’d intentionally chosen so he’d be calm and fed. He did a few pages, then announced he didn’t like math camp, didn’t want to do his booklet, and wanted to go play with Mason instead.

I told him that was fine, as soon as he finished the two pages he had left. He responded by throwing his book and pencil across the counter and tipping into tantrum territory. I hugged him, told him it was okay to be upset, and held the line: he needed to finish the booklet before he could go play. He eventually calmed down, half-heartedly finished the pages, and we moved on with our day.

In the moment, I was pulled in so many different directions - I didn’t want him to think a tantrum was a valid way out of something, I didn’t want to reward throwing things, and I didn’t want to be a pushover. But underneath all of that was another worry: was I about to turn something he genuinely liked into something he’d learn to dread?

What AI Told Me To Do

To be fair, I didn’t ask Claude what to do in the moment. In this case, it probably would have been better to do so. I was simultaneously focused on being done with the situation and thinking about my last post - that an urgent question to AI doesn’t typically result in the right response, and I wouldn’t have had the time to get out what I really wanted to. Later, I submitted the scenario above and asked Claude how it would have responded in the moment. Here’s what it said, summarized:

In the moment: Pause instead of pushing through tears. Validate the frustration first. Offer a choice that keeps structure without forcing compliance (“now or after dinner?”). Skip the why-it-matters lecture.

Bigger picture: Consistent resistance to homework is worth listening to. Ask whether the booklet adds anything the class doesn’t already give. At 4, required at-home practice is early - protect the intrinsic interest over the worksheet.

What The Research Actually Says

Graham has expressed real interest in learning about numbers, and he’s filled out these packets happily before, so I’m not actually worried about whether this is developmentally appropriate - if he’s enjoying it, there’s no problem. The problem arises the moment he says he doesn’t want to do it anymore. So the real question: is there a way for me to deliver the request that gets him to do it, without turning it into a power struggle while keeping his initial interest intact?

To answer this, I went back to Self-Determination Theory, developed by Deci and Ryan, which discusses what it takes to be intrinsically motivated: to feel connected, autonomous, and competent – exactly what I want for Graham when it comes to his booklet. The good news: there’s research by Mireille Joussemet, Renee Landry, and Richard Koestner showing intrinsic motivation can be built, or at least encouraged, by how a parent delivers a request (hooray!).

Joussemet, Landry, and Koestner discuss the concepts of structure versus control in their review (a review is basically a research roundup – not a new study). It sounds obvious once you say it, but structure is just clear, consistent expectations that respect the child’s feelings and perspective. Control is pressure, guilt, coercion, which, if I’m honest, is closer to what I did in the moment. A parent can hold the exact same boundary and get a completely different result depending on how it’s delivered. One of the studies in the review broke the ideal delivery into four concrete ingredients: give a reason, acknowledge the child’s feelings, offer some choice, and minimize pressure tactics.

A more recent study gets close to my exact situation. Julie Laurin and Mireille Joussemet (her again!) watched real parents ask real toddlers to do something they didn’t want to do, such as clean up toys, and tracked what happened over the next year and a half. Parents who explained why the task mattered, offered choices in how to do it, and used suggestions instead of commands ended up with toddlers who got better at willingly cooperating over time. Parents who leaned on threats, bribes, or criticism saw the opposite - their kids’ willing cooperation actually got worse.

What To Try Next Time

Claude and the research didn’t exactly conflict, but as usual, the research gave me more depth and a far more holistic understanding - one that’ll actually stick with me. The structure-versus-control distinction gives me, well, structure.

We’re on vacation next week, so I’m a little off the hook. But once we’re back, here’s the plan: keep the after-quiet-time, during-snack schedule for the booklet, since consistency is part of structure. Give Graham a real reason - that the booklet helps build his brain, not just “because I said so.” Offer him a choice somewhere in the process like which page to start with, or whether to do it before or after a snack. And when resistance shows up again (I know it will), acknowledge it before holding the line, instead of holding the line first and acknowledging it after.

The goal isn’t to make this optional. It’s to keep requiring it, but to actually deliver it the way the research says works. I want to build his intrinsic motivation, not stifle it at age four.

We’ll be doing this all summer, so I’ll be back to update you on how it goes!

Sources

Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (1985). Intrinsic motivation and self-determination in human behavior. Plenum Press.

Joussemet, M., Landry, R., & Koestner, R. (2008). A self-determination theory perspective on parenting. Canadian Psychology, 49(3).

Laurin, J. C., & Joussemet, M. (2017). Parental autonomy-supportive practices and toddlers’ rule internalization. Motivation and Emotion, 41(6).

Graham recently had his last day of preschool before summer break. In an attempt to soften the transition from a school-day routine he’d known for nine months to his new camp schedule, I wanted to hold onto some of the rituals that had anchored his days. One of them: crossing off each day on a monthly calendar, a practice his school had sent home for families who wanted to continue it.

I showed him the June printout and he was immediately excited - at school the teachers sometimes do the crossing-off, sometimes the kids do, but at home it would be all his. I handed him a green marker. The first line of the X was perfect, but the second line bled into the next box. He called it messed up, then he asked for a new calendar, then he asked me to do it for him.

I tried reasoning (“it’s great!”), encouragement (“practice makes perfect!”), and then what I was sure was a stroke of genius: I grabbed Beautiful Oops! by Barney Saltzberg - a book we’d read a hundred times about turning mistakes into something wonderful. I opened it, showed him the examples. He kept crying and asking for a new calendar. The opposite of a stroke of genius.

My first instinct was to frame this as a perfectionism question - my husband leans perfectionist, and I’d been watching for it. But sitting with it afterward, I think something else might be going on. The part that stood out wasn’t “fix the calendar” - it was “you do it.” Which made me wonder whether this was less about his standards and more about what he’s learned to expect when things get hard.

What AI Told Me To Do

When I brought this to Claude, it framed the meltdown as developmentally typical and offered practical fixes: pre-mark the squares in pencil so he traces, switch to stickers, make the boxes bigger, swap the marker for a stamp. The broader advice was to name the frustration, stay calm, and normalize imperfection over time.

All reasonable. But Claude was answering a perfectionism question because that’s what I initially asked. It didn’t know about the “you do it.” And that detail changes things. And this is part of the problem of going to AI without thinking through the question or checking the research – I typed off a quick request and got a quick response. But only after sitting and thinking through the situation, did I realize the true issue. It’s not that Claude gave me the wrong answer here – it’s the shortcut that crept in when I could easily go to Claude instead of considering what happened more thoroughly.

What The Research Actually Says

Okay, there are three important concepts we need to define to figure out what was really going on with Graham and the X.

The first is the Zone of Proximal Development, developed by Lev Vygotsky, which is a foundational concept that every early childhood educator encounters in their first year of school. It proposes that at any given moment a child has three zones of ability:

1. What they can do independently

2. What they can do with support (where the learning happens!)

3. What they can’t do yet

That middle zone is the sweet spot. It’s where the task is challenging enough to require effort but achievable enough that the right support can bridge the gap. The operative word being right, because the kind of support matters as much as whether it’s offered.

Which is where the second concept comes in: Self-Determination Theory (SDT), developed by psychologists Edward Deci and Richard Ryan. SDT says that humans are naturally motivated to learn and grow but that motivation depends on three basic psychological needs being met:

1. Needing to feel autonomous

2. Needing to feel competent

3. Needing to feel connected to others

When those needs are supported, motivation comes from the inside.

Which brings us to the third concept: over-scaffolding. It’s not a formal academic term, but it has emerged colloquially from a body of research, particularly the work of psychologist Wendy Grolnick on parental involvement and what she calls autonomy-supportive parenting. In her research, the distinction is between controlling parenting (stepping in, taking over, removing the struggle) and autonomy-supportive parenting (offering just enough help to keep the child moving while letting them do the actual work). Over-scaffolding is the colloquial translation: what happens when a parent consistently does too much, too soon.

Now let’s connect the dots!

Graham is learning to make an X on the calendar, which means he’s right in that middle zone Vygotsky describes. The goal is to offer just enough help to keep him moving without removing the struggle that builds competence.

Here’s the thing: I didn’t make the X for him. In that moment, I held back. But he still asked me to.

According to SDT, children develop intrinsic motivation when their need for autonomy and competence is supported consistently, not in one moment, but across hundreds of small moments over time. So the question isn’t whether I over-scaffolded on a Tuesday morning in June. It’s whether I’ve done it enough times before that Graham has already learned that when things get hard, mom can fix it.

I didn’t take the marker from him. But the fact that his first instinct was to hand it to me matters.

What To Try Next Time

I can’t stop turning over the calendar moment in my mind, wondering whether Graham asked me to do it because he was having a hard day, or because he was tired, or because somewhere along the way he learned that asking mom is just the faster path to a clean calendar square. I don’t know. But I do have the research, and I now have the opportunity to be more intentional going forward. Here’s what I’m going to try:

• Acknowledge the feeling before offering any help. Before I reach for a solution (or a copy of Beautiful Oops) I’m going to try naming what’s happening first. “That’s frustrating. The marker went where you didn’t want it to.”

• Wait longer than feels comfortable. The support should come after Graham has had a genuine chance to struggle.

• When I do help, do the minimum. Maybe offering a smaller next step - “do you want to try the next day’s box?”

• Let it be imperfect. If I’m calm about a slightly messy X, he has a better chance of learning to be too.

I might find out how I’ve been doing the next time I hand him a marker and step back, or the time after that, or the one after that. That’s the thing about patterns: they don’t reveal themselves in a single calendar square. But I know what question I’m asking now, which is more than I had when I typed off a quick description to Claude without stopping to think about what was really going on underneath it. The research didn’t give me a clean answer. It gave me a better question. And for a four-year-old with a green marker and high standards for his X, that feels like a start.

Sources

Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (1985). Intrinsic motivation and self-determination in human behavior. Plenum Press.

Grolnick, W. S. (2003). The psychology of parental control: How well-meant parenting backfires. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes. Harvard University Press.

My husband and I went away for a quick 24 hours to attend a wedding while my in-laws watched the kids at our home. We intentionally kept the trip short, had Grandma and Grandpa come to our house, and provided detailed notes about the daily routine - in an attempt to avert a disastrous return when the less fun caregivers (us) returned home.

As we walked in the door, Graham sprinted across the house screaming “Yay Mommy! Yay Daddy!” and jumped into my arms. Mason was in his highchair eating lunch, wiggling and squealing the moment he spotted us. Success! Or so I thought. I jumped back into action, helping Grandma finish lunch before eventually getting Mason out of the highchair for nap. This is pretty much where the goodwill ends. What followed was crying, then screaming, then my two-year-old sleeping on me for his entire two-hour nap - something he hadn’t done since he was an infant. The afternoon eventually evened out, but never fully returned to normal.

Monday morning confirmed it. The kids were still out of sorts - sibling fights before breakfast, wrong foods, everything a negotiation. And here’s the thing: I felt like we’d done everything right. Short trip, familiar setting, and grandparents who know the routine. It didn’t matter.

What AI Told Me To Do

Claude’s advice was basically: don’t expect to fully prevent the post-trip meltdown, but do what you can to make the separation and reunion feel predictable.

Before leaving, it suggests explaining the trip in a calm, confident way: Mommy and Daddy are going away for one sleep, Grandma and Grandpa will take care of you at home, and we’ll come back tomorrow. It also recommends keeping the big routines intact such as meals, nap or quiet time, bedtime, while letting the grandparents be flexible on the smaller stuff, like extra books, simple meals, or a little more TV. Things I did.

It also suggested giving each kid a small connection object, like a note, drawing, or little “mom and dad” item they could hold onto while we’re gone. Okay, fine, a good idea I didn’t do.

The last piece of advice was about coming home: next time keep the reunion calm, don’t rush into chores or unpacking, and spend 10–15 minutes reconnecting on the floor with the kids.

What the Research Actually Says

The research on what happens when primary caregivers are absent for a night or two is pretty slim, which isn’t super surprising given how hard it would be to study and how un-alarming the outcome usually is. Kids are fine by Tuesday. It’s one of those experiences that’s hard but doesn’t interest researchers because it resolves on its own.

What did surprise me was that when I pushed a little harder, Claude admitted the papers it was drawing from weren’t really about my situation at all. Its first big suggestion was to check out “restraint collapse,” which is primarily based on school-age children managing the demands of a school day, with evidence in kids with ADHD or sensory processing differences. Other research it suggested was from families separated by war, incarceration, or the foster care system. One night away from my kids, who were at home with their grandparents and a typed-out routine, is not a meaningful comparison.

The research that could be considered applicable comes from two older papers – one foundational piece of research from Mary Ainsworth and her Strange Situations experiment (sounds creepy - its not!), which established that securely attached children between the ages of 12 and 18 months show distress when being separated from their main caregivers and emotional release when reunited. Okay, good to know.

More interesting (and found without Claude’s help, thank you very much) is a 1991 study by Dr. Judith Crowell and Dr. Shirley Feldman published in Developmental Psychology. They observed 45 mothers and their 2–4 year olds in a structured lab separation and reunion. Mothers were classified by their own attachment style and scored on how they prepared their children for separation and how responsive they were to their children’s emotional cues on return. Children were scored on comfort during separation and reunion behavior.

Two findings landed for me. First, children’s comfort during separation was linked to how well mothers prepared them beforehand. Second (this one hurt a bit), child avoidance at reunion was linked to mothers’ emotional responsiveness in that reunion moment. A child who doesn’t fully reconnect when the parent returns may be responding to a parent who jumped straight back into logistics before completing the emotional landing.

Did jumping straight into making-lunch mode cause me to miss the reconnection moment?

What To Try Next Time

I genuinely wasn’t expecting an a-ha moment here! I assumed Claude would mostly be right and I’d be fact-checking. And Claude was right but the post-trip reunion recommendation was sort of buried under a bunch of other generic suggestions. That's where Crowell and Feldman did something Claude couldn't: they gave me a finding precise enough to recognize myself in it.

When it comes to my kids, I try to think ahead and move them through the day with the least amount of friction. When I walked back in that door, I gave both boys hugs and kisses, told them how much I missed them and then immediately helped finish lunch, because lunch needed finishing. In my mind I was being helpful by sticking to the routine. By Crowell and Feldman’s framework, I had just skipped the most important part.

What I’d do differently: let Mason finish eating, take him out of the highchair, and sit on the floor with him for a few minutes before moving toward nap - reconnection on his terms. The research suggests that small moment of presence at reunion is doing a lot of work. Whether a few extra minutes on the floor would have prevented a two-hour contact nap, I honestly don’t know. But given the reasonable evidence base, I’m willing to give it a shot!

Sources

Ainsworth, M. D. S., Blehar, M. C., Waters, E., & Wall, S. (1978). Patterns of attachment: A psychological study of the strange situation. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Crowell, J. A., & Feldman, S. S. (1991). Mothers’ working models of attachment relationships and mother and child behavior during separation and reunion. Developmental Psychology, 27(4), 597–605. https://doi.org/10.1037/0012-1649.27.4.597

Mason is finishing lunch and as I walk over with the wipe, I’m already thinking a few steps ahead to one of our toughest transitions of the day - naptime. For a while, I didn’t have a great way to get him downstairs and into his room, but recently we’ve started playing a game: putting all his trucks to sleep first. I scan the room - there’s recycling truck, firetruck, ambulance, and “beep-beep” (his little bicycle). Not too far from the stairs. Okay, great.

“It’s time to start getting ready for nap! Let’s put recycling truck to sleep!” I say in my most sing-song voice - a voice that will be nowhere to be found in approximately 25 minutes. “No sleep! No sleep!” The response I knew was coming. The cajoling begins: “Let’s put beep-beep to sleep. Let’s go downstairs. Let’s read books. Let’s go to your room.” I can hear my voice shifting with each ask, the annoyance bleeding in with every repetition.

Mason eventually moseys over. And as we inch through this process, I find myself simultaneously wondering and feeling guilty: should I be more strict - is it my fault he doesn’t listen to the first request? Or should I be more patient - am I rushing him, and is that edge creeping into my voice going to eventually ruin our relationship? Parenthood is the ultimate paradox.

What AI Told Me To Do

Given this wasn’t an immediate crisis, I had a chance to think through my question to Claude. After debriefing it on the situation, I type out the following question: Mason eventually comes but I’m starting to wonder about a few things: (1) Is it a problem and a product of my poor parenting that he doesn’t do what I ask on the first try? (2) Am I causing him long-term anxiety by “rushing” him and is the annoyance in my voice going to impact our relationship or how he responds to others?

Claude’s response: On the first question, no. The trucks ritual is actually clever parenting — using his imaginative world to bridge a hard transition. The non-compliance isn’t defiance; the prefrontal cortex that handles “stop what I’m enjoying and do what someone else wants” simply isn’t developed yet.

On the second: the annoyance isn’t the problem. He’ll hear your voice shift thousands of times growing up, and what he learns from that is that emotions are real and relationships survive ordinary frustration. What matters more is the warmth that returns once you’re both settled into books.

A few practical suggestions: one instruction at a time instead of a cascade, give him a role so he feels like a participant rather than a subject, and don’t force the sing-song voice past its expiration date — he can hear the difference anyway.

What the Research Actually Says

My big question: what’s the best way to handle a toddler transition that results in a smooth handoff short-term (strict or lenient?), and doesn’t do any lasting damage long-term? The honest answer is that the research doesn’t resolve the long-term piece. Longitudinal studies on the effects of impatient parenting are thin. But there’s quite a bit on what’s happening in Mason’s brain when I ask him to stop playing.

Garon, Bryson & Smith (2008) reviewed decades of research on executive function in preschoolers and the cognitive skills that let us override what we want to do in favor of what we’re supposed to do. Two components are directly relevant: response inhibition (stopping an enjoyable activity when asked) and set shifting (disengaging from one mental state and moving into another). Both are undergoing their most significant development between ages 3 and 5. Mason just turned two, which means he’s not even at the starting line yet.

In other words, his non-compliance isn’t a behavioral choice I’ve somehow permitted. It’s a brain that isn’t built for this yet.

The same review makes one more useful distinction. When a child is directly confronted with losing something they want, their brain locks on - researchers call this “hot” executive function. When the same situation is reframed as a game or a story, there’s enough distance that the brain can actually cooperate - this is “cool” executive function. The trucks ritual works because Mason isn’t being asked to stop playing anymore, instead he’s putting his trucks to bed. Same transition, but his brain isn’t fighting it the same way.

What the research doesn’t tell me is whether the edge in my voice at minute twenty-five is doing any lasting damage. I’m hoping Claude is right and the warmth on the other side of it matters more than the friction getting there. But that’s instinct (and AI), not data.

One footnote worth mentioning: when I asked Claude to point me toward the research, it confidently gave me a well-known researcher’s name. When I went looking myself, I found a pretty interesting paper with over 4,000 citations that Claude never mentioned. It wasn’t wrong, exactly. It just gave me the popular answer. Which is sort of the whole point of this section.

What to Try Next Time

I’m sticking with the trucks and trying to stay more calm (I guess lenient?). No dramatic overhaul since apparently the ritual was already working, and the research and AI explained why PLUS they agreed this time.

The open question for me is staying calm and regulated myself at minute 25, when the sing-song voice has long since expired and we’re still in the hallway. I don’t have a good answer for this yet. That might be its own post!

Sources

Garon, N.Garon, N., Bryson, S. E., & Smith, I. M. (2008). Executive function in preschoolers: A review using an integrative framework. Psychological Bulletin, 134(1), 31–60.

The Scenario

Mason is two and he is opinionated.

We’ve just pulled into the garage after his swim lesson (my least favorite mommy-and-me activity) and I’m unbuckling him from his car seat when he starts: “I shoo it, I shoo it!” His version of “I do it.” I stop. I run through the greatest hits. Do you want to undo the buckle? Press the garage button? He usually loves the garage button. “No, no!” I pull him out anyway, already doing the math in my head - naptime in twenty minutes, no lunch yet, the clock ticking, and he immediately starts to cry.

I suggest the garage button again. More crying. I set him down in front of the back door and fish for my keys while he wails. My upstairs neighbor is on the shared deck with a full view of this, which I try to ignore, and fail to.

Inside, I pivot to food. Banana bread, cheese stick, milk? I’m warming and unwrapping things as he screams at the back door, yelling “butt, butt,” which is his word for button. I realize that whatever he wanted to do, I missed it, and we are now well past the point where banana bread is going to fix anything.

I pick him up, now screaming and physically resistant, and carry him to his bedroom. I try a book. He makes a break for the door, fast, and I catch him and put him in his crib. This makes everything worse. The screaming hits a new register. This is the moment where my brain shuts down. So I do what a lot of parents are doing when they hit the wall: I open Claude.

What AI Told Me To Do

I typed it out from the bathroom: Mase is 2 in a few days. He’s at almost 25 minutes of tantruming. We’re right up against his nap. I’ve tried a lot — food, water, being silly, hugs — nothing is working. Looking for some advice right now as he sits in his crib and cries while I hide in the bathroom.

Claude’s guidance centered on one reframe: at 25 minutes, the goal is no longer resolution - it’s containment. Specifically, it recommended:

· Stay with the crib. More input like talking, offering things, trying to redirect can actually extend the tantrum. If he’s safe, let him cry.

· Brief, low-stimulation check-ins. Every few minutes, go in with a soft voice and a single line: “I’m here. It’s nap time. I love you.” No negotiating, no new ideas. Then leave.

· Close the door. Consistency with sleep cues matters. An open door signals that something else might be happening.

· Give it more time than feels comfortable. On bad days, 30-40 minutes of total crying before sleep is within normal range.

What the Research Actually Says

Claude suggested I read a study published by Michael Potegal and Richard Davidson called Temper Tantrums in Young Children: 1. Behavioral Composition, which Google Scholar showed has 334 citations. Unfortunately, it’s behind a pay wall and I’m still waiting to see if the authors give me access but here is my understanding based on the abstract:

The study analyzed parental descriptions of 335 children between 18 and 60 months and found that a tantrum isn’t made up of one emotion. It’s made up of distinct emotional components that operate independently. The two major ones: anger and distress.

When I looked back at Mason’s meltdown through this lens, I see the distinction. The crying in the car, the rage at the door, the physical resistance: these responses are anger. The crying in the crib, the reaching: that’s distress. I was hoping I’d be able to find research on how to respond to these different emotional states but that’s a question the research I could access couldn’t fully answer.

What I found instead was a 2012 study by Mesman, Oster, and Camras in Attachment and Human Development that complicates the framework in an interesting way. Sensitive parenting, they argue, doesn’t actually require you to identify which emotion your child is in at any given moment. What it requires is reading the overall level of distress, understanding the context, and adjusting as you go. Not exactly a precise diagnosis.

Which, if you think about it, is both reassuring and a little unsatisfying. You don’t need to know exactly what’s happening. You just need to be paying attention.

What I Actually Did

Mostly what Claude told me to do.

I stayed in the bathroom next to his room and waited. After about seven minutes I could hear him tapering off, the screaming softening, and I went back in. Amidst sniffles, he immediately asked for a book, a core part of our pre-nap routine. Of course, I said yes. He laid down on his belly while I read, sang a few songs, then picked him up for a hug and an “I love you” before I left.

I was surprised it worked that well. Giving him space and then coming back at the right moment, when the anger had burned off and the distress had softened, turned out to be what he needed. I’m still not sure if I got lucky or if I genuinely responded in the right way at the right moment.

Sources

Potegal, M. & Davidson, R.J. (2003). Temper tantrums in young children: 1. Behavioral composition. Journal of Developmental & Behavioral Pediatrics, 24(3), 140–147.

Mesman, J., Oster, H., & Camras, L. (2012). Parental sensitivity to infant distress: what do discrete negative emotions have to do with it? Attachment & Human Development, 14(4), 337–348. https://doi.org/10.1080/14616734.2012.691649

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