Questions Nobody Warned Me About, Part 8: It's Okay Not to Love Every Stage

The toddler phase is not my favourite.

I said it. It is out there now.

I want to be very clear about what I am and am not saying. I love Sam completely. He is twenty-six months old and he is one of the great joys of my life and I would not revise his existence for anything. What I am saying is that the specific developmental stage he is currently occupying — defined by intense physical will, zero impulse regulation, the word "no" deployed as both question and answer, and an approach to transitions that suggests transitions are a personal attack — is not the stage I find most engaging.

It turns out this is a legitimate position. It took me a while to accept it.

The pressure to perform uniform delight

There is a social norm around the enjoyment of children that is approximately: all of it is precious and you should savour every moment. This norm is expressed, relentlessly, by people whose children are older, who have the benefit of retrospective editing, and who have had the specific amnesia that parenthood apparently produces about the more exhausting phases.

The norm is not malicious. It is partly true. The moments are precious. The retrospective view is probably accurate. I have written about this myself — the awareness of time, the deliberate presence, the staying still when a child climbs on you.

But the norm also creates a pressure to perform enjoyment at a uniform level across all stages and circumstances, and that pressure is both dishonest and counterproductive.

Dishonest because some stages are harder than others. The newborn phase, for me, was survival more than enjoyment — I was present, I was committed, and I was also running on nothing and experiencing a state I can only describe as controlled emergency. The toddler phase with Sam is characterised by a specific kind of relentlessness — the constancy of need, the volume of intervention required, the gap between his ability to want things and his ability to understand why they are not always available — that I find depleting in a way that Ellie's school-age conversations do not.

Counterproductive because pretending to enjoy something uniformly prevents you from managing the harder parts with any intelligence. If you can't say "this bit is hard," you cannot make adjustments. You just endure, and perform the enjoyment, and feel subtly fraudulent.

What I have been honest about

I told Claire, early in the toddler phase with Sam, that I was finding it harder than I expected. This was both useful and slightly risky — useful because it opened a conversation about the distribution of load, risky because the norm is sufficiently embedded that saying "I find this hard" can feel like failing.

What she said was: "I know. I do too. Which part?"

Which is the correct response. Which part specifically? What is it, within the hard, that is the hardest? That question produces actionable information. It is much more useful than either performing uniform delight or remaining submerged in undifferentiated difficulty.

My part: the transitions. Sam finds any transition — from one activity to another, from inside to outside, from awake to the theoretical possibility of a nap — genuinely distressing in a way that requires significant management. The cumulative emotional labour of that management, several times a day, is what depletes me most quickly.

Knowing this meant we could think about it. We adjusted the approach to transitions — more warning, more countdown, more acknowledgment of the difficulty rather than pushing through it. It helped about 40%. That is not a solution. But 40% less of the hardest thing is meaningful.

The thing worth saying to any older parent

The heightened awareness of time that comes with later parenthood — the deliberate presence, the staying in the moment — is real and worth maintaining. But it does not require you to enjoy the difficult moments. It requires you to be in them. Being in them honestly, including the honest experience of finding them hard, is more presence than the performed enjoyment that keeps you slightly behind glass.

Ellie is five. The conversations I have with her now — specific, curious, occasionally wise, reliably hilarious — are the stage I am finding most engaging. I find her easy to delight in.

Sam is two and a half. I love him with everything I have. I will be relieved when this stage is over.

Both things are true. Both things are allowed.