120 Week Old Toddler: Your Toddler's Development and Your Recovery This Week

Your toddler is starting to notice other kids, and starting to want in on the game.

Around 27 months, most toddlers are making short eye contact with other children, copying your tone of voice (and words you wish they wouldn't), and imitating favourite gestures. Pretend play is fuller, feeding a doll, making "tea", pretending to drive. Two- and three-word phrases are common, and they understand far more than they say.

Parallel play is the norm at this age, two toddlers playing next to each other without really playing together. Real sharing does not land until closer to 3 years, and that is fine. Do not push it.

Two-year-old mouths look ready for everything but their airways are not. The no-go list stays the same as when they were 12 months:

• Whole grapes, whole cherry tomatoes, halve them lengthwise
• Whole nuts, popcorn, hard candy, gummy candies
• Peanut butter in lumps (thin it with a spoonful of yogurt)
• Sausages in round slices, split lengthwise first
• Chunks of cheese or raw carrot, grate or steam

Toddlers this age have small, short-lived crises several times a day, dropped biscuit, wrong colour cup, sibling touched their toy. The shortcut:

• Acknowledge: "The cup was blue. You wanted red."
• Offer a choice, not a fix: "Do you want this red cup, or a blue one from the cabinet?"
• When they cool down, move on, do not replay the drama.

• If your toddler refuses food and water for more than a day, has blood in their stool, or has no bowel movement for 3+ days with hard pellets, call your pediatrician.

Parallel play, pretend chai and borrowed gestures are tender 2 year old milestones, each one a step toward the friend and person your child is becoming. You have a front-row seat to it all, and no one claps louder for them than you.

Around 29 months. Saying "thank you", "sorry", "please", basic etiquette starts taking shape.

What's happening for you

• You're modelling all of this. The way you talk to family, helpers, strangers, your toddler is watching.

Things that often help

• Say please and thank you to your toddler ("can you hand me the spoon, please?")
• Apologise when you're wrong, including to them
• Let them see you treating helpers, drivers, vegetable vendors with respect
• Don't model what you don't want them to learn

For mum's role

• Modelling values is mostly invisible work. The pre-school you in front of your toddler is the model they internalise.

Eating well

• Three meals + two snacks. Real food, real meals.

Worth flagging

• If your own behaviour around your toddler concerns you, yelling at helpers, dismissive to drivers, judgmental about strangers, and you want to change, that's a fixable pattern. Therapy can help. So can deliberate practice.

Indian-context note

• In Indian homes with helpers, how you treat them is a major lesson for your toddler. Equal humanity, appropriate boundaries, respect, these shape your child's lifelong assumptions.

Indian-tradition kept

Greeting elders with namaste, touching their feet on auspicious days, addressing relatives with respectful suffixes (-ji, mausi, chacha)

• these small daily rituals carry real cultural weight. Your toddler learns from watching.

Indian-mum reminder

• Don't perform when relatives visit. Be the same mum you are alone, that's the mum your toddler learns from.

An Indian-mum tradition kept

• A weekly oil massage, head, shoulders, lower back, with warm sesame, mustard or coconut oil. Done by yourself or family for 15-20 minutes. Indian aunties have known this is restorative for centuries. Modern medicine agrees.

Being watched so closely by little eyes can feel like pressure, but it is also proof of how much you matter. Modelling rest, honest apologies and kindness to yourself is mother self care your child learns from too; the way you treat yourself becomes part of their education.