how to keep toddler from climbing?
My 16 mos old son has discovered that he can climb onto dining room chairs, stand on them, and lean over the table. He doesn't listen when I tell him to stop. How do you explain "no" when kids are this age? Even if I pull chairs away from the table, he still climbs on them. I'm tempted to remove the chairs from the room (since I find that removing dangerous objects is the only way that I can control his behavior).
3 Answers
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That's a hard one! My 17 month old loves to climb more than, it seems, anything else - what an adventurous age! if you say "uh oh!" and take him down, it may simply become a game to climb up and get carried down. You could remove the chairs, if you don't mind doing that, or maybe you could make the chairs less desirable in some other way (beyond sliding them away from the table)? Undesirable things... stuff on the chair that's hard for a toddler to remove and prevents climbing? Or make something else more desirable - like a nearby stool or slide? Or, find a safe way for him to discover what you think is dangerous about climbing on chairs? Just some brainstorming...
For what it's worth, my daughter wants to climb on our chairs, but can't make it up on her own (yet) - I wonder if she's shorter or if we have different chairs (for example, we don't have a bottom rung to step on). If you have a bottom rung, is it (safely) removable? (By the way, I don't remember this being a problem with my older child so I'm thinking "insatiable climbing" might pass quickly. :)
Also, for whatever it's worth, we've decided to take our daughter's insatiable climbing into chairs (plus a few other "signs" - like wanting to take off her clothes, and seemingly new awareness of some bodily functions) as a go-ahead to put a small potty in her room... and in a very laid back way start to encourage her to sit on it. We'll see how it goes.
- andrea, Jul 1, 2010
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My son was doing exactly what you describe at that age and much younger. I tied the dinning room chairs together around the table with a big sturdy rope. Put the chairs around the table and push them in all the way. weave the rope in and out of the backs of each chair until you are all the way around the table, pull the chairs tight into the table and knot. When It was time to eat, we untied them. It was the only thing that saved my sanity for almost a year.
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At 14 months our youngest would climb onto the chairs and then onto the table. He thought it was great. Eventually we started putting the chairs down on the floor. Annoying since we would run into their legs all the time, but it worked. We also gave him lots of other places to climb -- we took him to parks that had safe but challenging things to climb. We were happy for him to explore his new skills, we just didn't want him to think climbing on the table was okay.
it may help to also see some ideas here: http://parentsguild.com/post/question/1202/when-to-ignore-versus-correct
- andrea, Jun 30, 2010