Every toddler's meltdown is secretly the construction of a soul

For the first several months of a baby's life, nothing much resembles a boundary at all. Child development researchers describe this period as a kind of union: the infant experiences no real separation between herself and her mother, and that closeness, far from being something to rush past, is the foundation everything else gets built on. Cloud and Townsend call the goal of this stage emotional object constancy, an inner sense that you are safe and loved even when the person who loves you has left the room.

Only once that foundation is in place does the next, stranger phase begin. Somewhere between five and ten months, researchers have observed something like a switch flipping: babies who wanted nothing but closeness suddenly become fascinated by the wider world, wriggling to get down, more interested in bright toys than in being held. Child development professionals call this hatching. It can feel, to an unprepared parent, like rejection. It is actually the first sign that a self is beginning to form.

Hatching gives way to what researchers call practicing, roughly from ten to eighteen months, when a toddler who has just learned to walk seems to believe she can do absolutely anything. It is exuberant, occasionally dangerous, and, Cloud and Townsend argue, exactly as it should be. A child who is never allowed this brief taste of omnipotence, hemmed in too tightly too soon, often grows into an adult who is either excessively timid or who never quite gives up the fantasy of limitless specialness.

The final stage, rapprochement, arrives with the sobering discovery that the child cannot, in fact, do everything. This is where the word no gets perfected, along with mine, my, and me, words some parents mistake for pure selfishness but which Cloud and Townsend describe as evidence of a soul acquiring ownership over itself.

What happens if a parent withdraws love, through silence, hurt looks, or punishment, every time a child in this stage asserts a separate self? Cloud and Townsend say the child learns a devastating equation: I am loved when I comply, and abandoned when I don't. That lesson, learned at two or three years old, tends to resurface decades later in an adult who still cannot say no without expecting to be cut off.

If you are raising a small child, let the stages happen instead of rushing them. Welcome the clinginess of the early months as the safety a child needs before anything else can be built. When your toddler starts wriggling away from your arms toward the world, resist reading it as rejection and let her explore inside safe limits. When the practicing stage turns her briefly reckless and grandiose, stay close enough to catch real danger without popping every bit of her excitement. And when she finally discovers no, mine, and me, and tests them on you constantly, hold your actual limits firmly while staying warm, so she learns that disagreement costs her nothing in your love. That old fear of abandonment, if you recognize it in yourself instead, traces back to whichever of these stages went wrong, and that is where the repair work has to start.