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Home › Articles › Baby Gear › Stroller Struggles

Stroller Struggles

Tips for Alleviating Stress When Out and About

By Shannon McKelden

Pages:  1  2  3  4  

Tips and Tricks
When a child doesn't want to be in the stroller, he has no qualms about letting you know it. Crying and physically struggling to stay out of the stroller may ensue.

"If this is a temper tantrum, you make the decision if you want to continue on your venture or abandon the effort to try again another day," Dr. Steltenkamp says.

Kelli Estes, a mother of two from Snohomish, Wash., learned quickly to pick her battles when her son decided he didn't like the stroller. "If it was no big deal to have him walk, I'd let him walk," she says. "Sometimes it meant skipping a store or two, but I learned early on to get the most important stop done first so that it was OK to miss the less important ones."

Dr. Steier recommends making the stroller an appealing place to be in its own right. This can be done, for example, by attaching toys and rattles to the stroller, designating certain objects as "stroller toys," special because they are only accessible during rides in the stroller. "Laminated pictures of animals, family members, [and] cartoon characters can be taped to the tray table," Dr. Steier says. "The child's attention can be drawn to them as he or she is pushed along."

Dr. Steier also recommends providing snacks on the tray table as a strategy for helping children tolerate being in their stroller. Estes often tried this trick when it was important for her son to be in the stroller. "First, I'd give him a snack that he loved and his juice cup in the stroller tray, which he always thought was pretty cool," she says. After making the stroller more enticing with food, Estes would then strap her son in, even if he was fighting her, and start walking. "By then he'd realize the battle was a useless one and he'd settle down and eat his snack," she says.


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