12 New Year’s Resolutions Your Toddler Won’t Be Making This Year

Toddlers are a special bunch.

Parenting toddlers brings joys and challenges and it’s painfully beautiful it is to watch them grow.

They are energetic, loud, playful, demanding, expressive little people. While parenting them can be exhausting, there is a lot they can teach us about life.

There is no question that toddlers live life to the fullest. They max out the potential of every millisecond.

This time of year is filled with talk of reflection and resolutions–things you did well the past year and things you’d like to change going forward.

You won’t find toddlers entertaining such discussions though.

Instead, they are content in their perfect innocence, bending each day to their will the way Superman bends steel.

While we desperately love our toddlers, there are probably a few things we’d change about them if we could.

Since our toddlers won’t be making any new year’s resolutions this year, I took the liberty of putting together a list of resolutions for them.

Of course, your little one won’t be sticking to any of these, but you will still love them to pieces anyway.

At the end of this list, I’ve also included 5 beautiful things your toddler already does that they will keep doing this year.

12 New Year’s Resolutions Your Toddler Won’t Be Making This Year

1. Eat more vegetables.
2. Try to take less than two hours to wind down and fall asleep at bedtime.
3. Sleep through the night and wake up at a reasonable hour (remember to ask mom and dad to define “reasonable.”).
4. Calmly accept that chocolate and ice cream are not breakfast foods.
5. Let mom and dad watch a television program they like once in awhile (they only watch what you watch because they love you).
6. Drink more water (pool water doesn’t count).
7. Sleep in on weekends–and let parents sleep in, too!
8. Gracefully accept the limits parents set.
9. Carefully select toys to play with instead of haphazardly dumping everything on the floor twelve times a day.
10. Remember that “I don’t know” is not an actual meal mom or dad can make.
11. Give mom and dad at least a second to finish responding to a request before making another request.
12. Remember that the floors and walls at home are not blank canvases for art projects.

And here is a list of five beautiful things your toddler will continue doing this year.

1. Amaze you with their growth and understanding.
2. Express love and gratitude to family and friends in the most surprising and thoughtful ways.
3. Say hilarious things you’ll want to write down for posterity.
4. Model your behavior–the good and bad–and make you reflect on yourself.
5. Grow perfectly into the individual they are meant to be.

This post originally appeared on The Mom at Law. It has been reprinted with permission.