390. Parenting toddlers through power struggles: How to set limits, support independence, and reduce meltdowns with Devon Kuntzman

Devon Kuntzman (00:00):

We can talk about all the tools all day, but in the moment, you’ve got to think about your child’s temperament, their personality, how they’re wired, how tired they are, how you’re feeling, where are you in the process. There’s a lot of things to consider to kind of know, well, what’s your next step here?

Dr. Sarah Bren (00:22):

If you are the parent of a toddler, I don’t need to tell you that this can be a challenging stage of parenthood. So today we’re going to help you make sense of what’s happening in your toddler’s brain and body, and give you practical tools to make this stage feel a little easier and a lot more enjoyable. Hi, welcome to Securely Attached. I’m Dr. Sarah Bren, a clinical psychologist and mom of two. In this podcast, I’ve taken all of my clinical experience, current research on brain science and child psychology, and the insights I’ve gained on my own parenting journey and distilled everything down into easy to understand and actionable parenting insights. So you can tune out the noise and tune into your own authentic parenting voice with confidence and calm. And this week I’m joined again by toddler expert, certified coach and author of Transforming Toddlerhood, Devin Kuntzman.

(01:15):

Devin has such a clear and compassionate way of explaining why this stage feels so intense, not because your child is difficult and not because you’re doing something wrong, but because toddlerhood is a period of enormous developmental change. Together we talk about why toddlers seem caught between independence and attachment, how rapid brain development fuels power struggles, and meltdowns, and why big reactions to limits are often about a child trying to come to terms with not being in control. We also share practical tools to help slow things down, support executive functioning and reduce the intensity of everyday conflicts. And before we get into our conversation, I wanted to let you know that you can still get a free ticket to Devon’s Transforming Toddlerhood Conference. It’s a virtual event starting March 11th that brings together leading experts to give parents practical evidence-based tools around toddler development, behavior, emotional health, and discipline.

(02:15):

I’m so excited to be presenting this year along with some other amazing guests like Dr. Shefali and a few familiar faces for those of you who have been following along with this podcast like Dr. Cara Goodwin, Greer Kirschenbaum, Tracy Gillette, Lizzie Assa, and more. So I will add the link that you can use to sign up for this free event to the episode description. So go ahead and grab that link from wherever you’re streaming this episode to join over 100,000 parents and caregivers from around the world at this amazing virtual conference. Okay, let’s get started with my conversation with Devon.

(02:49):

Hi, Devon. Welcome back to the securely attached podcast. I’m super excited to continue our conversation about toddlerhood today.

Devon Kuntzman (03:03):

Yay. I’m so excited. I love toddlers. Even though it’s a very challenging developmental period, it’s also very critical and very exciting, and I could talk about them all day and all night.

Dr. Sarah Bren (03:16):

Yes, I know. Well, it’s like we always hear terrible twos and three major, those terms are thrown around and I think there’s valid reason for it. The time with such intense developmental shifts, and I don’t know if we were changing that fast, we’d be pretty irritable too. Absolutely, yeah. But that’s also what makes them so incredible. As you know, you are such a champion for holding both.

Devon Kuntzman (03:46):

Yes.

Dr. Sarah Bren (03:46):

The intensity and the joy.

Devon Kuntzman (03:49):

Yes. I just think that the reason that toddlerhood gets this name is because it can feel grueling sometimes. Let’s just admit it. Sometimes toddlerhood can feel grueling. Right now, I’m in the middle of solo parenting. I’m like, oh yeah, there’ve been moments that I’m like, what’s happening right now? My husband’s traveling for work. There’s a lot of moments that I’m just like, oh my gosh, it’s challenging. I’m in the thick of toddlerhood at my house. And there’s also so many magical moments here and there’s so much happening in your child’s development and so many first, so many magical moments that we just have to remember that it’s hard to be a toddler. It’s hard to have all these needs and desires to be independent and want to do it on your own, but then need so much emotional support from your secure attachment from your home base. And so it’s a challenging place to be because just experiencing so many contradictory needs and feelings every moment, which is why it feels so hard for us.

Dr. Sarah Bren (04:51):

Maybe we can paint a little picture of some of the developmental milestones that are coming online in toddlerhood that make some of what they tend to show up. So volatile. What’s the big shifts among many, but what are some of the big ones?

Devon Kuntzman (05:13):

Well, I really like to talk about the overarching shift that’s happening is that for the first time, your child is recognizing that they are a unique individual. They are their own person, and as their own person, they’re like, oh, wait. When I do something, it impacts my environment and my environment reacts, whether it’s the physical world, you throw something and it breaks, or you throw something and your parents have a reaction, whatever it is, but the environment reacts. And so toddlers are really trying to understand what it means to be themselves and develop a sense of self for the first time. And that means drawing a line between themselves and their primary caregivers to say, I’m a separate being. But that comes out in all of these behaviors that can be challenging and seem very egocentric because toddlers are really egocentric and they think everything is for them and about them because they’re trying to become their own person.

(06:12):

So that’s where you see your toddler always saying no or wanting to do it by themselves, or you ask them to do something and they run the opposite way and all of these things. But then the next moment you’ll see your toddler clinging to you and wanting to be held or falling to pieces or not wanting to go try something new. And so there’s so many, this is the contradictory needs because they want to be their own person and be independent, but they also are very reliant on us to get their emotional physical needs met. And so all of this kind of paints this picture where it almost feels like we have whiplash, right? Because one minute our toddler is acting this way, the next minute they’re acting this way. And it can be really confusing. It’s also confusing for your toddler though, too.

Dr. Sarah Bren (07:05):

Yeah. Yeah. I always say I feel like I’ll work with families that are experiencing a sleep regression or a behavioral regression, and a lot of times they’re like, no big changes have happened. I’ll always go through the usual suspects of, has it been sick or is there a new sibling or a change in routine, like new job for mom and dad with a new schedule or school or whatever. And when it’s none of the above, usually it’s some recent cognitive or gross motor leap, which changes their whole world again. And it’s like talk about our whiplash, which is totally a good way of describing parenting, a toddler of one moment they’re screaming at us that they must do it themselves, and then literally within the same breath, they’re like, but you’re not doing it for me the right way do it. But their experience, I feel like of the world feels very whiplash. They go to bed one night and the world looks a certain way, and then they wake up the next day with kind of a new lens because their cognitive capacity evolved and their cognitive end physical growth is not this perfect slope. It’s more like a staircase, like it plateaus and then it grows really quick, and then it’s plateaus, and then it grows. So it’s like they wake up to a new world and that can feel really disorienting to ’em.

Devon Kuntzman (08:39):

Absolutely. And we see it in so many different skills because where they’re learning new gross motor skills, maybe they’re learning how to jump, how to balance the boundaries of what their bodies can do, but then they’re also learning fine motor skills and trying to learn how to control their hands to color or put on shoes, put on clothes, or we get a box from Amazon and my son wants to take his kid to scissors that don’t really cut, but he wants to open the box. He sees me do with the real scissors. And then the verbal skills. You have toddlers who are just learning, especially young toddlers, just so many new words and phrases every day, one day, they can’t communicate the next day with the biggest, most intense word they can summon in the moment to try to describe how they feel, even though it’s not the right word from our adult logical lens. So there’s so many areas of development happening at the same time underneath this umbrella of your child trying to become their own person that yeah, that’s why toddlerhood gets labeled as terrible.

Dr. Sarah Bren (09:47):

Yeah, it is. And it’s like also they still, like you were saying, they want to do a lot of stuff. So their sort of frustration tolerance is being maxed out on a very regular basis because what they want to do doesn’t usually match up with what they’re capable of achieving on their own. And so that creates a big, it just sets the bar so easy, it just sets the tone for a lot of meltdowns because the way I’ll often describe it is there is this sort of window, especially between two and five, where before two, there’s this happy oblivion that most kids often have most of the time where they’re just whatever, I’m just sort of along for the ride. And then around two-ish, obviously it’s different for every kid, but around two-ish there’s this, oh, wait, you were saying cause and effect. I make an impact and I have an idea and I want it to be this way.

(10:56):

And there’s this growing discrepancy between their newfound ability to have an idea of how they want something to go and their capacity to make it happen that does not kind of meet that slope of growth until around more like five or six. So there’s this window of time where there’s this increasing awareness of what they want, what the world has to have offer them, and how much they would like to control that world, but their capacity to make it happen just doesn’t match. It’s almost like if you think of a line, and for people who are watching, I’ll be able see this, but if you’re listening, picture a graph where you have this really high slope of a line of ideas of what I want and how I want it to be, and it’s very high, but then there’s this other line below. It’s like my capacity to make it happen the way I want is still pretty low. And then it starts to climb up and actually start to meet those two lines, start to meet more after five, six, and the interim is terrible, the frustration tolerance that gets just absolutely maxed out by the bigger, the discrepancy between what I want and my ability to make it happen, which is super high at two and three and four, and it gets a little bit better. But then what you want becomes more complex. We’re always going to have a discrepancy, but like, oh, that is, I feel like what makes kids so reactive in this period of time.

Devon Kuntzman (12:36):

And it really has to do with their lack of control over their lives. Because honestly, as parents and caregivers, it’s our job to keep kids healthy and safe and to keep one and two and three year olds healthy and safe. There’s a lot of times that we can’t let them do the thing that they want to do, and also we have an agenda for the day, and our agenda doesn’t necessarily match their agenda. So this is why kids get so bent out of shape when we set a limit. If you set a limit and your child has a really big reaction, that doesn’t mean you did anything wrong or neither did your child. It’s your child trying to come to terms with the fact that they aren’t in control at this moment, when more than anything they just want to be in control because they’re trying to exert their will and be their own person.

(13:29):

So it’s really interesting because toddlers, a lot of their behavior, it truly is to meet their needs and trying to figure out how to have the world work in their favor and get their needs and desires met. So one thing that you can do when you have a toddler who is trying to do something, but you’re just about to say no, you don’t really understand it, or say you’re stuck in a power struggle with a strong-willed child, you might say something like, what’s your plan? Because when you can ask your child, Hey, what’s your plan here? Then it gives them a chance to kind of say what they’re trying to do or what they want to do, and then you can maybe help them find a way to do it that’s within your boundaries. It doesn’t mean you have to say yes to everything, but when your kids can tell you a little bit more about what they’re trying to do, and this works with older toddlers, three and four and older school age kids, you’ll be surprised by actually the ideas that your children have, what they’re trying to accomplish, and how you can create a lot more buy-in instead of just going straight to the know and getting locked in the power struggle.

Dr. Sarah Bren (14:41):

And I love that, especially because what you’re suggesting there also has an added benefit of requiring them to slow down a bit because toddlers are notorious for their lack of impulse control. So the space between idea and action is like paper thin if at all present. But when you say, okay, what’s your plan? You are helping stretch them in this more the state of readiness rather than action, this state of ideation rather than doing. And one that’s just good for slowing their speed down and helping build that sort of a brake pad for impulsivity, but also it’s helping them organize their thinking. These are executive functioning skills. You’re activating the prefrontal cortex when you say, what’s your plan? And they say, I want to do this. And you say, oh, okay, and how would you like to do it? Oh, I want to do it this way and that way. And now you’re getting them to start to sequence their thinking in and organize it. And in doing that, you’re turning on the part of their brain that’s also regulating them and slowing them down. So it’s like that does so much from a neuroscience perspective to work with a toddler’s brain rather than against it, a very useful, useful, skilled pull.

Devon Kuntzman (16:07):

I love that. And it really also helps us as the adults slow down too, because whenever we’re starting to feel triggered when we want to just jump in, we’re feeling that sense of urgency that our brain is creating for us, where most likely this situation isn’t urgent. Or we can do something to make sure everyone’s physically safe to be able to say, Hey, this is an emergency. Let’s take away the sense of urgency here. So whenever we say this, we can also slow down, which might start to shift us from automatically reacting to intentionally responding, and our interaction might go better with our child, or it might match a little bit more how we intend to respond as a parent, but sometimes aren’t able to because our own stress response and nervous systems getting hijacked in those moments.

Dr. Sarah Bren (16:59):

Yeah, no, it definitely, it slows everyone down. It buys you time. You might know that you’re going to have to say no to this kid and their idea. And if we’re really quick to say no, we also know that there’s going to be potentially a meltdown on the other side of that, which makes us kind of more vulnerable to moving into that threat response of like, oh my God, here, we’re going to go again. But if we can stay in the readiness with them a little longer, we’re also buying ourself time because a lot of these interactions happen so fast. I want this. No, and then we’re like, it’s okay. But if they’re like, I want this, they’re like, oh, you want this? Huh?

(17:44):

What is your idea? How would you like it to go? Well, I want to do this, blah, blah, blah. And it’s like you’re just stretching it all out a little bit. And then when we do say, well, I see where you’re going with this. We can’t do that now, but when could we make time to do that? And now we’re staying in the planning space with them while staying, no, we are setting a boundary, we’re holding a limit, but we’re doing it in a way that isn’t, I don’t know, it’s just it’s in the slow space rather than the intense fast hot space.

Devon Kuntzman (18:22):

Yes. So I personally call this tool turning a no into a not yet. So this is one way that you can set a limit without saying no. Now it’s important to say no sometimes, especially if there is a safety risk. If your child is about to run into the street or maybe hitting a sibling, something like this. If there’s a safety concern, sometimes we need to get a kid’s attention, we need to say no. But if we’re always saying no, first of all, kids start to drown it out because it’s like they don’t even hear it anymore. We’re just saying it all day long. But second is because again, your child’s whole developmental drive is around becoming their own person. If we’re constantly saying no, then they see that as someone trying to work against them, and then you’re pushing against each other, so you’re not going to really have the influence that you want and your kid’s probably going to get more upset and have a bigger net meltdown.

(19:27):

But in moments when you need to set a limit and it’s appropriate, you can turn a no into a not yet want to go, your child wants to go to the park, and then you can’t go right now, but we can go later. When can we go, when can we do this? Or last night, my son, it’s like 10 minutes before we go to bed, he wanted to drag out the Play-Doh. I’m like, okay, we can’t do that right now. So I had to turn that no into a not yet. And we set it all out. We got it ready, we put it on his little table for in the morning. It was exciting. I wrote a little note on a sticky pad and put it on his door so we’d remember whatever, all the things. And so when we can turn a note into a, not yet, oftentimes we can still set the boundary but not go through the full meltdown mode. Now, sometimes kids will still get upset because they want it right now, but a lot of times we can avoid the power struggle and the meltdown mode, especially once kids get used to you using that tool. The more you use the tool, the more accepting of the tool they are.

Dr. Sarah Bren (20:34):

And I could see too, I mean, I’ve been there myself with a kid who’s like, I want this. And I’m like, it’s bedtime, and I don’t want to spend five more minutes like, oh, you’re trying to drag out bedtime and now I’m going to collude with you and drag out bedtime by setting up the Play-Doh and putting a note. But what I would say to parents who, because I get this all the time, are that’s a lot of work. That’s a lot of work. That doesn’t feel always I should be able to say no and have it be so much work. And yes, I agree, and sometimes you just do, and that’s the bandwidth you have and the limit you’re setting. But what I always will remind parents is sometimes when you front load that energy, and I will not lie to you, I’m suggesting something that’s energy intensive when you might be tired and you don’t want to always, you might not have the bandwidth to do this, but when you do front load that energy of helping your kid make a more feasible plan, a not yet plan, what you’re also doing for that kid, especially right before bedtime where we’re trying to not have a lot of open threads in their mind and their body, we want them to be able to shut the day off.

(21:51):

And if they have this new idea of Play-Doh and we’re like, no, then what they’re going to be thinking about and feeling in bed when they’re trying to go to sleep is like Play-Doh. And if we can help them close that loop by completing the cycle of the idea, okay, there is a place for this idea to live, and it’s not in my mind and it’s not in my body, and it’s on the table with a note that mom wrote, so I trust it. I can really leave it alone and go into rest.

(22:27):

And so sometimes it’s like, yeah, we often, you do such a good job of this Devin, of talking about not just focusing on the behavior and coming up with a way to change the behavior. And if we’re so focused on they’re delaying bedtime and I want to shut that down, we sometimes forget that there’s a lot more to it for the kid. What is the idea or the wish or the need. And for some kids, it might just be, I’m just trying to delay bedtime because the need is I want more time with you right now, and I’ve got feelings about what comes on the other side of you saying goodnight and turning out the lights. I don’t like being alone, but for some kids it’s that no, they just really had an idea. And the Play-Doh idea is strong and exciting, and guess what?

(23:16):

That’s arousing. And when we’re trying to go to bed, an arousing idea is going to really fight us. So helping a kid conclude that idea with some sense of closure so that they can actually transition to sleep, there is utility in that, and it has nothing to do with behavior. It’s just understanding how our minds and our bodies work. And I think when you could shift your focus off of behavior to a larger lens of like, well, what is my child thinking about and feeling and needing right now? And that could be just developmental, then I don’t know. It just feels like we have more angles to intervene.

Devon Kuntzman (24:05):

And I love what you’re saying here because sometimes we might not have the bandwidth, and sometimes we do have to kind of delineate, are they selling bedtime? What’s the point of this behavior? They’re not just doing this behavior just to annoy us or frustrate us. At the end of the day, there’s going to be a reason. So is it for connection? Is it because they’re too on it? What’s happening? For myself, just to further take this example a little bit further, if my son’s like we’re already in his bedroom and doing this stuff, then I would likely just say, okay, we’ll do that tomorrow. And maybe I’ll say, oh, let me put a note in my phone or something. Basically, once we’re in his room, we’re not getting out of the room, we have already got in the room. However, if we’re not in the room yet, then I’m like, okay, let’s just put, and it can be super simple like, oh, let’s just put the box of Play-Doh on the table or whatever. You don’t even have to set it up, but sometimes taking literally that extra 30 to 60 seconds to do something can save you five to 10 minutes of a meltdown and you’ll actually get to bed faster.

(25:13):

And so that’s the thing about parent, this is where we can talk about all the tools all day, but in the moment you’ve got to think about your child’s temperament, their personality, how they’re wired, how tired they are, how you’re feeling, where are you in the process. There’s a lot of things to consider to kind of know, well, what’s your next step here? And guess what? Sometimes we’re going to get it wrong and be like, oh, note to self, that was the wrong choice. And then we’ll do differently next time because we all have those moments because in the end, our child is their own unique human being and we can’t always predict how they’re going to react or respond when we say something.

Dr. Sarah Bren (25:55):

Yes, we are so in alignment on that. I love the work that you do, and you have this amazing book out and the Transforming Toddlerhood conference that you run every year, which I know is coming up. I think you have done such an amazing job with your toddler parent community of giving parents a lot of tools so that they can say, I have a big toolbox. I can pull out different things at different times. There is no one right way. You can solve the Play-Doh at bedtime problem infinity different ways. But feeling confident as a parent that, okay, at the end of the day, I got to just do some deduction here. Like you were saying, I got to check all those variables. Okay, how much bandwidth do I have? How much bandwidth does my kid have? What do I think is really going on here?

(26:53):

What works with my kid, what doesn’t work with my kid? When we have that baseline, we have so much more flexibility and fluidity and nimbleness as parents, because I think parenting a toddlerhood, because they can be so reactive and so rigid, they can elicit in us a lot of reactivity and rigidness. It’s like a very contagious, and I think being able to be flexible and nimble and calm when parenting a toddler is like an art and a science and a marathon. And so feeling resourced is really important because you’re going to have to think on the fly a lot. And I know you have lots of resources for parents for that. So I’m curious, with the new conference, it’s your ninth one, right? The transforming C Toddlerhood conference that you do?

Devon Kuntzman (27:55):

Yes.

Dr. Sarah Bren (27:56):

How many different speaker? How do you think about the different angles you’re going to get covered in that conference? A lot of wealth of knowledge coming to that.

Devon Kuntzman (28:08):

Yes. The whole point of this conference is to get information to parents the easiest and fastest way possible. So every year we have five days of the conference, and I typically have the same topics each of the five days because those are the topics that I find are the most pressing for parents, which is health and safety, physical health and safety, then emotional health. And then we’ll talk about development. And then the fourth day, we always talk about specific behavior challenges in the fifth days, all about discipline tools that are healthy and effective. And so the reason that I set it up this way is because these are the areas that parents are struggling with the most and the way the conference is set up that this is free information during the conference that everyone can access because we don’t have time to be Googling everything, scrolling Instagram to find our answers. And so by having an event that brings in experts that is free for everyone to access, it can really make a huge difference in terms of the ripple effect in children’s lives when parents have all this evidence-based information.

Dr. Sarah Bren (29:24):

I like that so much. And I think what I, it’s like to your point, usually when we Google or pull up our phones to scroll Instagram on a parenting dilemma, it’s usually because there is something happening right now and we are reacting to it, or something just happened that didn’t go well and we’re trying to problem solve it, troubleshoot it, but it’s usually when we’re somewhat hot ourselves or stressed and we’re dealing with a problem. And frankly, that’s not the most optimal time for learning because we are also sort of not in our learning thinking brains. But when you do something like this intentional, okay, I’m going to get information, broad resourced information from, well-vetted people who know what they’re talking about, and I can get a wider broader range of perspectives, strategies, foundational understanding of things, then I can internalize that I can put it inside of my system, my family values, I can put it into my way of parenting my toolbox, if you will. And then when there is a hot moment, I have it accessible because I learned it at a time when I wasn’t freaking out about something, which is I just think sometimes a couple hours of intentional learning has more utility than these sort of quick, what’s going on with this thing? And then we get this quick little soundbite that doesn’t help us so much.

Devon Kuntzman (31:17):

Yeah, I mean, the thing is that Instagram is a bunch of soundbites, right? But we’ve got to have the wider context. And so by having an event like this conference allows parents to access that wider context. And there’s also an option to upgrade to have lifetime access to all of the sessions of the conference. And for everyone who upgrades, there’s also this ability to listen to every session in a private podcast. So you can actually listen while you’re driving when you’re on the go, which makes learning a lot easier because this is the thing, yeah, when we’re in the heat of the moment, it’s not the time for us to really learn the skills, and it’s not the time for our kids to learn the skills. And so the thing is, is that we all feel pressed for time, and there’s a lot going on.

(32:08):

So it’s really just about learning a little bit here and a little bit there and bite-size moments around when we have that space and capacity. And that’s why some people sign up for the conference and they just choose one or two sessions to listen to and they get something they need and go apply it, and that’s great. And then others want to listen to every single session because they’re ready to binge watch Netflix or something like that, which is awesome too. But it’s really about looking at your toolbox and then asking yourself, okay, where’s the gap? Where’s the support I need? Is it with mental load? Is it with staying calm? Is it understanding my child’s development? Do I need more tools in the toolbox? Do I have a specific challenge I’m trying to resolve? And so looking at that can be really, really helpful.

(33:02):

And this is also why I wrote my book as a quick reference guide because sometimes we just need to get to the point. And so you just need to look up tantrums and you’re like, okay, what do I do when we’re in a tantrum? What are we? So I think the point is a transparent toddler. I’m trying to make it easier and easier for parents to get the information they need and learn, because parenting is one of the most important jobs we’ll ever do, and we don’t necessarily have a lot of extra time in our lives to just sit and learn and invest in ourselves at the same time.

Dr. Sarah Bren (33:35):

Yes. I mean, I think that there are lots of different types of parent conferences, and what I really like about yours is that it’s highly curated. You’re thinking about the people that you bring on, you cover such a wide range of topics. But I don’t know, like we were saying, the last thing parents need is more noise. And having a curated filtration system is so valuable, and I feel like that’s very much what you have always done with transforming C conferences. So I’ve always loved the way you work, and so I think it’s a really good resource.

Devon Kuntzman (34:19):

Oh, thank you so much. Yeah, I mean, the reason I’ve done it nine that I’m on my ninth one, and it is virtual, so parents all over the world can access it no matter what time zone you’re in, no matter where you are from the comfort of your own home. And the thing is, is that when I see every year, and you can go on my Facebook page and see hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of testimonials from this conference, and every year I’m like, oh, it’s my last one. And then I see what a difference it makes in everyone’s lives, and I’m like, you know what? I’m going to do this again because it’s just such an in-demand resource. So then I do it again.

Dr. Sarah Bren (34:55):

And it’s not, I mean, I am like, oh my God, that must be so much work. So if you’re doing it, it’s got to be such a labor of love.

Devon Kuntzman (35:02):

It really is. I say that every year and an email to, I’m like, this is a labor of love and I love it, but it’s a labor of love.

Dr. Sarah Bren (35:13):

If people want to get information about that, where should we send them for the conference?

Devon Kuntzman (35:19):

So you can go to transformingtoddlerhood.com/conference, and then you can see the entire lineup of speakers. You can sign up for free and get all the goodies, because this is really the biggest thing that I do all year, and I’m just so excited about it because to bring everyone together and to foster such a big learning community, I mean, every year over a hundred thousand parents join this event too.

Dr. Sarah Bren (35:50):

That’s amazing.

Devon Kuntzman (35:51):

Yeah.

Dr. Sarah Bren (35:52):

Who’s your highlight? You’ve had Dan Siegel, you’ve had Tina Payne Bryson, who’s your headliner this year?

Devon Kuntzman (35:58):

Yeah, Dr. Shefali this year.

Dr. Sarah Bren (36:00):

Oh my God. That’s awesome.

Devon Kuntzman (36:02):

Yes, yes. So super excited about that.

Dr. Sarah Bren (36:05):

Yeah, I think that this is a really useful resource. I mean, I really recommend you guys sign up for it. You can hear me talk to, but I’m not as cool as Dr. Shefali. Sorry.

Devon Kuntzman (36:16):

No, your talk is amazing. We’ve already recorded it, and it is absolutely awesome.

Dr. Sarah Bren (36:21):

Well, thank you. I think that it’s always really fun to get invited to do the talks because it forces me to, because I always talk in this kind of setting on the podcast where it’s like, it’s so conversational, and yours was actually very conversational too, but I think it really forces me to organize my thinking ahead of time and be like, okay, I’m going to have a full arc, a beginning and a middle and an end to what I’m going to teach, which when we record podcasts on securely attached for all listeners who know, it’s like you never know where the conversation’s going to go, which is fun too, but I think it challenges me to really, really put it into a package. So that was always really fun for me. All right. Well, well, I’ll put in the show notes and the show description links for the conference for Devon’s book because that’s an awesome resource too. And oh my gosh, thank you so much for coming back on and sharing all of this fun toddler breakdown with us.

Devon Kuntzman (37:23):

Thank you so much. I love talking about toddlers, as I said, and any toddler, parent or caregiver that I can support through this challenging yet critical developmental period just warms my heart. So thanks for having me.

Dr. Sarah Bren (37:43):

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