‘Choose your battles’ is the mantra in our household at the moment. Sophia has a will of iron, and if her ideas on what should happen and my ideas on what should happen don’t coincide then we have a problem. A big problem. A problem who, although under 3 foot with huge melting brown eyes, peachy soft skin, wispy blonde hair and an angelic smile, takes only a split second to turn into a tomato-coloured, screaming, screeching, thrashing, wailing termagant.

To be fair, this is usually caused by some gross stupidity or unreasonableness on my part. Only this week, for example, I asked Sophia if she would like a bubble bath. She enthusiastically agreed, but was then understandably furious that these bubbles went onto her skin when she got into the bath. I obviously should have realised the magnitude of this issue and forewarned her. And how could I possibly have given her pasta for dinner, when she doesn’t like pasta? Granted she had cheerfully, even voraciously, eaten pasta for around 60% of her meals since she was about 8 months old, but I should have realised that she doesn’t like it now.

Obviously I want to avoid these meltdowns as frequently as possible, but there are many times when I can’t. Unreasonable I may be, but she is not going to go to pre-school in her pyjamas, or watch Charlie and Lola for five hours solid or put my iPhone in the bath. Nor am I very keen on her communicating her views on where she wants her sister to sit by dragging her there by the hair, or going out in the pouring rain with no coat on, or swinging on the stair-gate. Her teeth are going to be cleaned twice a day, and she does need to hold my hand when she crosses the road and she must be fastened into her buggy so she doesn’t tip out onto the pavement.

With all these red lines which I have to try and stop her crossing, more and more I find myself murmuring ‘choose your battles’. In a perfect world she wouldn’t drop food onto the floor, or hide the green tops of the strawberries she has eaten down the side of the sofa, or dip her finger into her milk and use it to draw patterns on the table. I don’t know how much our neighbours appreciate her compulsion to walk along every front wall of a suitable height, or climb up and jump off every step to a front path. And wearing wellies to pre-school on a cloudless day when temperatures are reaching 20 degrees celsius isn’t necessarily ideal. I don’t want to turn her into a spoilt brat by pandering to her insistence that her snack is served on the red plate not the blue plate, or letting her have said snack on the sofa (all the better for hiding bits of strawberry bits) rather than the high chair, but equally, in the overall scheme of things, does it really matter? Is it worth a full-scale bells and whistles tantrum which leaves both of us tear-stained, frazzled and exhausted?

I’m trying to restrict my restrictions to things which might harm her or someone else, or which set up really bad habits we might struggle to break later. I have broken many rules which I set for myself when Anna was a baby – such as no television in the mornings, except in case of illness. Now, when it’s a Saturday morning and 6.30am and I’ve already been up for an hour, and Sophia is begging to watch (yes, you’ve guessed it) Charlie and Lola I just can’t be bothered to argue. Choose your battles. Letting her watch some telly then means she’s happy because she got what she wanted, I’m happy because I get to potter round the kitchen making banana muffins for breakfast while she is contentedly engaged, before slumping on the sofa next to her for a quick Instagram, fix, and the whole family are happy because they then get to eat the muffins. And the idea of imposing a ‘one toy away before another comes out’ is a distant memory.

Part of me thinks this is fine, sensible even. Why deliberately make both of us stressed and unhappy over arbitrary rules when there’s no need to? Especially as, because of the need to get Anna to school and various other activities on time, I already spend a lot of time telling Sophia that she has to stop playing to come and get dressed, get ready, get into her buggy and go out, so maybe it’s not a bad idea to cut her some slack the rest of the time. On the other hand, I can also see that it might be a slippery slope to total household anarchy, and that this is how youngest children get a reputation for being spoilt!

And then, of course, there’s the times when she sits on the sofa and ‘reads’ a story to her teddies, looking like butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth, and it’s impossible to believe that she could ever have a tantrum at all.

What do you think? Is my ‘choose your battles’ mantra a sensible and pragmatic approach to coping with a  strong-willed toddler, or a lazy parent’s excuse for failing to put their foot down?