Dealing with drama queen baby

Maggie’s current 17 month form of expression is to lay back and bonk her head on the ground while being a crying drama queen baby. This can be triggered by telling her no, simply by not understanding what she’s attempting to convey, or any number of reasons relating to tiredness level.

What’s worse is anything can be a trigger as we near bedtime, and Maggie doesn’t seem to realize she’s tired or express to us she is.

While some of these outbursts are justified acts of baby expression, many of them are just silly and it becomes hard to take baby seriously when she can be reduced to a head-bonking baby by simply moving a deadly object out of her reach.

While the parenting guides say to ignore it and let them express their baby rage, I’ve been a bit hesitant to let baby lay down and crack her head on things, I’ve also felt that ignoring what a baby is attempting to say doesn’t always help the situation.

As such I’ve been experimenting in active “so what do you think about that?” along with a bit of “come see me when you’re done making noise because I’ve got toys.” What seems to have the best success at the moment is to go and do something interesting when she’s having a breakdown for no reason.

I’ve found that responding to valid baby complaints with an action – such as taking and putting to bed immediately, seems to have worked out positively and staved off more fussing. Unfortunately it’s a guessing game as to which are experimental out of the blue psycho baby rampages and which are “I’m very upset right now that that piece of dirt was removed from my grasp because I’m exhausted”.

Trying to minimize the exhausted outbursts with a set bedtime and recognizing when the baby is starting to enter meltdown territory.

But the psycho freakouts for no reason, other than keeping her from bonking her head I pretty much let her do those until she figures out there’s not suddenly going to be a puppy and a lollypop appear for her.

But maybe I’m a terrible person…