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2 young children, CONTINUED ...Published: January, 2010

Doreen Dart is a Riverside mom with two boys 19 months apart; Donovan is 4 and Bryson is 2.
   
“They’re so rambunctious,” Dart says. “Having a routine is key in having some control over them. If I veer away from a routine, it throws them into either hyperspeed or tantrums.”

Dart is a stay-at-home mom, but she and her husband work together on as many parenting tasks as possible, she says.
   
“When he gets home, he jumps right in and plays with them and helps throughout dinner. He disciplines them if they are misbehaving at the dinner table, and we do the entire bath-and-bedtime routine together.”
   
Lori Breeden-Gomez, a marriage and family therapist with offices in Brea, says this sort of collaboration and communication is a key to successful parenting in a family with several small children. She recommends that parents each work out a “parenting plan.”
   
“Discuss how each of you will handle discipline, conflict, life lessons, etc. Communicate your parenting plan with each other; it might need to be modified as each developmental stage occurs. I can’t stress this enough; get on the same page about parenting with your partner, and ask for help when you need it,” she says.
   
Although she does get a lot of help from her husband, Dart says she’s often left “two-on-one” with the boys, a situation that can leave her feeling outnumbered and outgunned.
    
“They have the tendency to want something at the same time; of course two different things. I really think it’s based on their mood, whether they’ve napped or what they’ve eaten,” she says.
   
While kids tend to work together when it comes to being difficult for grown-ups to handle, sometimes inter-sibling conflicts will arise. Dart says that she has yet to hit upon a fail-safe method for defusing squabbles between Donovan and Bryson, but time-outs seem to suffice well enough.
   
“At the current stage, toys need to be in twos – meaning if one is playing with a toy, then the other thinks he should take it from him. In the past, if I heard a blood-curdling cry, I would have immediately thought, ‘Someone is badly hurt!’ No, someone has taken someone’s toy,” she says.