About Best Toddler Tips

I'm Tessa Vaughn — mom of two toddlers twenty months apart, which means my house has run back-to-back potty training, overlapping picky phases, and a two-kid bedtime that once took ninety minutes and now takes twenty. Before kids I spent six summers as a camp counselor, and I promise you: wrangling a cabin of seven-year-olds was the easy version of this job.

Best Toddler Tips exists because at 5pm on a hard day nobody wants an essay — you want a numbered list you can start at dinner. So that's the whole format here: tips that are numbered, so you can try one at a time, and testable, so you know by tomorrow whether it worked. Everything gets run on my own two before it gets published. If a trick only works in theory, or only works on the internet's imaginary calm toddler, it doesn't make the list.

Pick your battle: eating tips for the beige-food-only phase, sleep tips for bedtime stalling and curtain calls (start with the 15 bedtime battle tips), potty training quick wins, activities & boredom rescues for rainy afternoons, and out & about survival plans for cars, planes and grocery-store meltdowns.

What you won't find: judgment about how you parent, miracle cures, or made-up statistics. Toddlers are one to three years old; some days the win is everybody napped. I write the tips, I report honestly on what flopped at my house, and I flag anything where your pediatrician — not a blog — should be the referee.

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A note on affiliate links: some posts contain affiliate links — if you buy through one, I may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. I only recommend things that survived actual toddlers in this actual house.