Does your toddler keep moving furniture around all day? Here are 5 brilliant tactics to handle the madness.
Toddlers don’t sit still. Like ever. They like to jump, climb, shake, wiggle about and basically never stay in the same spot. What they also love doing is moving around furniture all over the house. And if you’re reading this then you certainly don’t need me to tell you how madenning that can be.
My toddler was about 16 months old when she realized she could push around the dining room chairs. Then she discovered she could drag the chair to the kitchen counter, climb on it and reach the stove. Soon she was able to reach the upper drawers in the kitchen and yank out the knives to play with.
Oh the joy.
So based on first hand experience, today I’m sharing with you 5 simple and easy to follow steps for when a toddler keeps moving furniture around the house all day.
Toddler Keeps Moving Furniture – 5 Steps to Handle the Madness
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1. Understand the reason for moving furniture
The first step to deal with any kind of bizzare toddler behavior is to understand it. That way you’re less frustrated when it happens and approach the situation from a place of understanding and empathy rather than annoyance.
Preschool teachers are taught that all behavior is communication and we are trained to observe, document, and analyze children’s behavior to understand what they are “telling” us.
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Toddler keeps moving furniture. Why?
Many toddlers learn to start standing and even walking by holding on to furniture. Sometimes it’s the coffee table, the stool or the dining chair legs. It’s usually around this time that they learn that if they put some pressure on the furniture it will slide along on the floor. This is quite a discovery for toddlers and a skill they would like to keep practicing.
Soon they’ve become confidant with walking, running and climbing and make another discovery. The furniture can be dragged to different parts of the house, climbed on and used to access parts of the house that were previously inaccessible.
This is all quite exciting and new for them; there’s so much unexplored territory that needs to be discovered!
Knowing all this really helps you see the situation more from your toddler’s eyes. It helps you understand that your child isn’t doing this to wind you up but is simply excited about all the new opportunities in their life.
2. Asses the furniture that’s being moved frequently
Now that you understand why a toddler keeps moving furniture, you can move on the pragmatic stuff.
The first step is to narrow down the main furniture pieces that are being moved about. Is it the dining chairs, the coffee table or the couch? Is it the side table, the TV table or the stools?
Once you know which furniture gets moved around the most frequently you can focus on that particular piece.
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3. Use anti-slip pads to protect flooring
By the age of 2, my toddler was able to easily push around the couch. I would put it back in place and leave the room, only to come back minutes later and see that it had been pushed around again.
The fact that I was visibly irritated was something my toddler immediately picked up on and started doing it even more frequently.
One of the things I was worried about was the hardwood floors getting damaged. So I researched on what other parents were doing to protect their floor from their destructive little toddlers. That’s when I first heard of anti slip pads or furniture grippers.
I was really excited to try them out because I thought I’d finally gotten my solution. The anti slip mats would not only protect my floor from damage but also prevent the furniture from sliding across when my child pushed at it.
I bought the anti slip pads and used them for the couch and dining table legs. They did a great job of protecting the floor from damage and also held my couch in place – my toddler couldn’t push it anymore! However my dining chairs are quite lightweight and the pads couldn’t hold up to my toddler’s pushes.
So I’d recommend you get the anti slip pads to protect your floor from damage and also to hold the heavier furniture pieces in place. But its not going to work on lighter furniture.
4. Remove furniture from reach/sight
This ones honestly quite annoying but I think when it comes to lighter furniture this strategy works the best.
So if there’s a coffee table that your toddler loves pushing around all day, just find it a new home. You can put it in a room/area where your toddler doesn’t go frequently. Or you could put it away in a store room and take it out when guests come over.
The same is true for dining chairs. If possible, you could keep them upside down on the dining table once mealtime is over. Or you could keep them in a room nearby that’s off limits for your child.
That’s basically what we ended up doing with our dining room chairs. We had a tiny spare room near the living room that always stayed locked. So every day we’d drag the chairs to the table and then hide them away once mealtime was over. It was honestly a bit of a drag (pun intended).
But the good news is that your toddler’s fascination with moving furniture is short lived. The novelty of dragging around chairs soon wears off and your little one finds a new activity.
5. Tame your reaction
Toddlers closey observe your reaction to their little antics. If a certain behavior gets a big reaction from you then they know it’s a great way to get your attention (even if that attention is negative). And they’ll keep doing it again and again just to see your reaction.
When the child misbehaves, resist the temptation to lecture, nag, scold, yell, or punish. Negative reactions will only keep the negative interaction going.
PSYCHCENTRAL.COM
So the best strategy is to keep your reaction as unanimated as possible. Which means no getting angry, yelling or timeouts.
Pretend that you don’t even notice that the furniture is out of place. Your toddler will quickly get bored of trying to get your attention through moving furniture and swiftly move on to other crazier activities.
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