How to Understand and Support Your Toddler

One father’s journey to better understand his toddler In this episode of the Learn With Less podcast, Ayelet chats with Joshua Morgan, a former high school teacher, husband, father, and participant of the Learn With Less® Curriculum Online Family Program. Joshua shares his journey toward a deeper connection with his 19-month old son, and how his path to learning about how his toddler learns strengthened the bond and helps him feel empowered to do the big job of parenting his son every day. Joshua received an advanced copy of the book, “Understanding Your Toddler,” a month-by-month development and activity guide for playing with your toddler from one to three years. You’ll love the way Joshua shares openly about his journey, the analogies he makes between parent education and early childhood education, and his self-reflection about what works for him and for his family. QUICK ACCESS TO LINKS FROM THIS EPISODE: Understanding Your Toddler: A Month-By-Month Development and Activity Guide For Playing With Your Toddler From One to Three Years, by Ayelet Marinovich Learn With Less® Curriculum Online Family Program, a parent education and parent support hub for parents, caregivers, and educators of infants and toddlers TEXT TRANSCRIPT OF THIS EPISODE Ayelet: How are you? Thank you so much for being here today with me. So, why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself, where you’re from and your family life so that people can get a sense of who you are. Josh: Sure. My wife and I, we live in Charleston, South Carolina area. We have one son, he’s 19 months old, and we have another little one on the way, due in July. But born and raised in the Midwest, Akron, Ohio area, moved down here to the South when I was in high school and been here ever since. Ayelet: That’s great. And how did you find Learn With Less? Josh: Yeah, good question. It started when I was looking for a solution to a problem that I saw. Let’s not call it a problem, let’s call it a circumstance, a situation that I saw was.. A concern, it was a concern. So, Daniel had his one year old birthday and someone bought him this, like transformer car, battery operated thing. And it went around in circles, and it went down, went up. But that’s all I did. And so, I would turn it on, and you know, he’s mesmerized by it and, yeah, he would pick it up and play with it and try to pull in, do whatever he can with it. But then sometimes he would just sit there and stare at it and you’re like, oh this isn’t good. He’s just staring at the thing. We were like, he needs to be active. He’s just like a just like a zombie. It just kept on going like that and I was like, well I think I should put this away and maybe there’s something that would be better at helping him in many areas – that would be a better tool to keep him engaged and keep him active and keep him exploring and learning. Yes, he was exploring and learning with this transformer toy. But most of the time he was passive with it. So I didn’t know where to go, I didn’t know where to look, and I did a lot of exploration online. Long story short it was around Thanksgiving time and oh yeah, I was looking for music.