With Oscar, I thought I'd found the method. Then Alice came along.

When Oscar was two, I had a technique for leaving the park.

I warned him five minutes beforehand. Then two minutes. Then “one more turn on the slide and we’re going home”.

It worked almost every time.

Naturally, I concluded that I was quite good at transitions.

A few years later, I tried exactly the same method with Alice, his two-year-old little sister.

Five minutes. Two minutes. One last turn.

Then I said it was time to leave.

Alice sat down on the ground.

“No.”

I reminded her that I had warned her.

She lay down.

At that moment, a rather unflattering thought crossed my mind: Oscar understood perfectly well at that age.

Then came another, much more useful thought: perhaps Oscar had never been proof that my method was exceptional.

When what “worked” with the first child no longer works

With a first child, it is hard to know what comes from us and what comes from them.

We establish a routine and they accept it. We offer two choices and it averts a meltdown. We explain calmly and they seem to take it in.

So it is easy to end up thinking: there, I’ve found the way to do it.

Then a different child comes along.

What reassured Oscar irritates Alice. He liked knowing what would happen next; she can know perfectly well what is coming and still not want it to happen.

That does not mean every method is useless. It just means a method never acts on its own. It also meets a child, with their temperament, sensitivities and particular way of reacting.

Two children may need two versions of us

For me, the trap was comparing Alice with Oscar.

“But with your brother…”

That sentence did not help her much. And it made me think that, if the same thing no longer worked, someone had to be doing something wrong: her or me.

Instead, I try to start with the situation in front of us.

At the park that evening, the limit did not change. We had to go home.

Alice protested. I helped her leave. She did not suddenly decide my method was wonderful.

But I did not need to conclude that she was more difficult than Oscar, or that I had become a worse parent between the two.

Oscar had taught me a few ways of doing things. Alice was mostly teaching me that none of them was a magic formula.