You know, sometimes it seems like I make these questions up myself just to provide the right springboard. Here's a recent email I received:

Let's tackle the first part here and the second part (about what, if anything, there is to do about multiple wakings) I'll get to in Part III (but yeah, unfortunately, there's no magic bullet during this age). So, what's going on in the child's head at 2.5 years old? I mentioned in Part I some of the highlights of the cognitive changes that are happening. Let's look at the emotional domain in more detail. Most of the following section was pulled from various parts of the book, but I had to add some extra commentary (and youtube clips) to pick things up a bit…

"According to Judy Dunn, a prolific researcher into the social side of early childhood, children this age begin to coordinate their newfound knowledge of people’s goals with their growing awareness of household rules. At about 28 months, the child can now understand how accepting or breaking rules asserts his own power over your goals, and hence your emotional states—no small advance in the diplomatic halls of family life. In fact, this understanding provides the child with a new level of social sophistication, social influence, and capacity for manipulation. When I'm talking about manipulation, I'm not saying they're these Dr. Evils in the making… But they ARE trying to figure out how far they can go in breaking the rules and what consequences will ensue; and the only real way to learn these things is to keep pushing up against their parents, the keepers of all that is good, safe, and powerful.

Toddlers will now test the limits, not only to see what they can get away with, not only to satisfy their basic need to assert independence, but to go a step further, to see how much social influence they really have. They will find a way to touch and eventually ruin or ingest whatever you least want them to handle: the kitchen knives, the computer, the bottles of detergent beneath the sink. With great concentration they will find a way to engage in the forbidden behaviour as soon as you enter the room. Why waste this potentially hazardous action on a parent who isn’t paying attention? And you know when they look at you with that glint in their eye? And say "NO way!" Or completely ignore your plea for compliance? Or… scream "SILENCE! you silly parent!" (forgive me… it's been a long day and these Dr. Evil references are cracking me up). But why do they do it? What could possibly motivate this obnoxious testing? It isn’t because they are truly evil—although we sometimes wonder. It isn’t because they really want to wreck your day, or be rushed to the hospital. It’s because they need to know how much control they have over the thing that matters most: how other people are feeling. And they need to understand what lies behind bad emotions as well as good ones. What they are exploring is the background logic of the emotional lives of those they love and depend on. If you suddenly had access to that kind of information, for the first time in your life, wouldn’t you dive in?

This is also the age that jealousy comes on line full force. Jealousy is certainly one of the most painful of emotions. Once it is let loose in the child’s mind, it seems to have the capacity to infect his thoughts and feelings, like a virus that self-replicates and makes the person sick. Nobody knows why it is so powerful, but we have all felt its sting. Nancy Friday, a brilliant writer who combines psychoanalytic and feminist principles in her work, shows how jealousy is inextricably coupled with feelings of shame and self-doubt. If the child feels that somebody else is more worthy of a parent’s attention, care, even love, then she cannot help but see herself as somehow inferior. Why her and not me? Am I ugly? Am I bad? Don’t you love me anymore? Not all children feel jealousy, and corresponding emotions of shame and self-doubt, with the same intensity. Not at all. Some children are just more sensitive to the loss of affection, or even the outright rejection, that all children feel from time to time. Those children will certainly be more prone to jealousy. Nevertheless, even the most sensitive child is less likely to feel jealousy if there is no sibling with whom to compete.

The 2 1/2 year old is particularly prone to jealousy if a new baby has shown up in the last 6-12 months (or if mom is pregnant). After all, there was no competition up until now. And the little baby is so…cute. And you spend an awful lot of time with her, you carry her around everywhere, you seem entranced by her, over the top with all your cooing and gooing. What’s that all about?! We don’t know of a cure for jealousy, but as parenting books and common sense will advise you, the best approach may be to make time for your older child, to reassure him about his specialness, to show him, as well as tell him, how much you love him, and to explain to him that babies need a lot of help because they are so…helpless. You can also enlist your toddler’s help with the baby, while commenting on how big, how cool, how ABLE he is. This will ease the sting. And then you can try to enlist a regular babysitter for the next 6 months to get you through the roughest patch. It is indeed going to be all about YOU (as the reader's question emphasizes) and kids this age will be the WORST behaved with mom in particular, and their parents in general. It's a rough patch to get through, but they DO get through it.