I recently picked up a copy of Harvey Karp's The Happiest Toddler on the Block from my favorite local bookstore, the Salvation Army. I'd heard good things about it from a few people, and I'd also found the Swaddling-shushing-swaying-shishkebabing-etc. advice from Karp's Happiest Baby useful when the girls were young, though I never actually read the book. (The S's were just the word on the street.)
I haven't read all of Happiest Toddler. I've skipped around a bit and focused on the sections that dealt specifically with two-year-olds. So far, I have mixed feelings about the book. Overall, it was a little too "cute" for my taste stylistically (enough with the exclamation points, Harvey!) and a lot of the advice just isn't practical for twins. Or any toddler, for that matter. Nightly massages before bed, complete with massage oil? Uh huh. Right. But the insights into toddlers' emotional and cognitive development were great, and most of the advice seemed to make a lot of sense on an instinctual level.
There was one particular tactic Karp recommends that I'd love to know if anyone else out there has tried. He calls it speaking "Toddler-ese" -- basically, talking to toddlers in their own language when they're upset / angry. You start by acknowledging what they want or feel, to let them know that they are heard and understood, then you shift into what you'd like them to do. Sounds pretty sensible, right? But when you look at the examples of what this might actually sound like....well, here's one example he gave, of what a mother said to her 32-month old twins who were fighting over a ball:
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