Over the last few months, the Mallet Household War on Terror, namely raising Xander, has escalated -- we are fighting increasingly pitched battles against the insurgent. His ever-increasing physical agility and strength, desire to have it his own way, totally random requests, and discovery of the word “no” have inflicted heavy damage on our general temperament and morale. We occasionally call up reservists [aka grandparents], but they can only handle him for short stints.
In other words, we’re dealing with the Terrible Twos.
One thing I’ve been wondering about, though, is whether there isn’t some pattern to the madness. In other words, if I gathered data about enough variables that might affect his behavior and tried to correlate them with his observed behavior, could I build a predictive model that tells me the probability of a meltdown in the next couple of hours, and what the most important contributing factors are ? [Actually, I wouldn’t really need a sophisticated model for that – a model that just predicted a 100% probability of an imminent meltdown would be correct 90% of the time …]
Some variables that might factor into this:
- Time since last nap
- Length of last nap
- Whether he’s gotten a new toy in the last couple of days
- Last time he ran around outside
- What he’s had to eat today
- Time since he last watched a bit of “Cars”
- Frequency of Bobcat rides in last week [our neighbor has one that he gets to ride on]
- “Toddler factor” drawn from a mixture of various distributions
Alas, I have no time to actually do this – having to say “No, stop it, get down, give me that, don’t do that, quit pulling on that, be careful, stop squirming” a few hundred times every hour is not conducive to careful data gathering.
