Welcome to the awesome marriage podcast, a place for honest conversations about marriage and practical advice on how to have a God-honoring awesome marriage.

I am your podcast producer and co-host Christina Dodson.

On the show will be your host, Dr. Kim Kimberling.

Dr. Kim is a marriage counselor and has been married for over 40 years.

His passion is to help you strengthen your most

intimate relationship. Parenting is hard and can be hard on a marriage. Parenting toddlers can

feel impossible and can be really hard on a marriage because toddlers are learning life and

boundaries and they haven't learned how to do with their emotions in a healthy way yet, they could honestly be kind of like little tyrants. We have seen way too many

marriages be really wrecked by these tiny tyrants. So today on the podcast, we want to speak

specifically to those of you in that stage and give you some tips on how to keep your marriage

healthy even when you have a tiny tyrant in your home.

We want to give you tools to tame that tyrant into a sane and emotionally healthy kid.

Most importantly, we want to help you find ways to make sure these toddlers don't rob your marriage

of joy and health.

So Dr. Kim, to kick things off from a psychology and kind of biology standpoint, why are toddlers

often kind of like tyrants?

Well, they're trying to figure out a lot, for one thing. They have feelings and emotions. They

don't only know how to handle. And so they overwhelm them. And so they come out in behaviors that

can be all over the place that just drive us crazy. They don't know how to self-regulate yet.

And, you know, they want their way. They're

selfies. Like all of us, and they haven't learned some of the constraints that we see that kind

of help us put things in order. So it's really just a stage of life for them. For the parents

...