I said this to my daughter the other day. (She’s about a month shy of three years old, to put it in context.)
“Crying means you need help. If you want to cry, but you don’t want us to help you, then you need to go cry in your room.”
Is that too mean? Am I a bad daddy?
I did this because it has seemed to me that the kid has been using loud crying, together with a refusal to articulate (despite the fact that when she’s happy, she’s perfectly articulate) in order to get a lot of people crowding around her treating her nice and trying to figure out what she wants. I try to avoid “paranoid parenting” but it has really come to seem to me that this is what she’s been doing lately. She doesn’t want to tell you what the problem is, because she likes the fact that you’re going through a lot of effort to figure out something to do that will be nice for her in desperate hope that she’ll stop making noise so the rest of us can think.
I started to suspect this after she told me, one day, “I like to cry.” I thought this was a cute, funny nonsensical thing said by a two year old at first. But further observation seemed to show she was simply telling us the honest truth.
So now, when she’s crying and not physically hurting, I’ve been telling her that unless she will tell us what it is she needs, she needs to go cry in the other room.
Since then, to my mind, she has indeed seemed more willing to articulate her problems rather than simply crying about them.
But am I probably fooling myself? Am I just being needlessly cruel by having her go “cry it out” in the other room to give the rest of us some peace?
My parents took the same approach. Once I (or my sibs) were old enough to sort of talk about whatever the problem was, crying for attention was verboten. Crying due to injury was 100% OK. They were real clear on both points.
Seems to have worked well. I only occasionally fly into psychotic rages & try to strangle passers-by. Just kidding.
I think it encourages conscious introspection at an early age. If I was upset about something not obvious to the adults, I needed to think about it enough to understand it enough to put it into words. An inchoate WAAH!!! wouldn’t work.
One differing factor is that we were all boys. There’s a recent thread about adult women who cry with very little provocation. Your daughter may be the junior version of one of those people. Though whether that behavior tendency is innate or those women just didn’t get trained out of it like you’re trying to do for your daughter I can’t say.
I do this with my just past 2 year old for the same reason. If no one is responding with attention to the undesired behavior (pointless crying) then the child has little reason to repeat it.
This is a pretty well-accepted behavior modification tactic, so don’t sweat it.
Assuming you have given us an accurate assessment of the situation (and I’m inclined to trust parents in the absence of evidence to the contrary) I see no problem with this. You don’t want her to use tears as a way to manipulate others, but you are also giving her permission to express herself when there is a real cause. She may be someone who cries easily, but if she is, she’ll learn appropriate ways to deal with it that do not needlessly distress others.
I’m a woman, by the way. Yes, we do cry easier than men. That doesn’t mean we have zero control, or that we can’t learn appropriate ways to handle our problems and means of expressing ourselves.
My younger sister used to do that when she was 6 or 7. My step-father cured her of the habit by standing in front of her and doing the same gaspy-wailing thing she was doing, and then laughing. It seemed to work, but I don’t really recommend it. Your way seems fine. You’re not telling her “if you cry we won’t help you/don’t care”, just that she needs to not abuse the privilige.
We have the same policy with our boys. They tend to cry out of anger and frustration, which is fine, but we have them go to their room and do it until they’re able to come out and talk about solving their problem. We don’t tolerate flailing and raging in the living room. Get yourself together and then we’ll negotiate a solution. In conjunction with that, we’ve taught them calming strategies - counting, breathing, distraction with another activity, etc.
This phrase jumped out to me. It sounds like a pattern you don’t want to establish/ continue. Your approach is one part of that, but you might want to consider some other things. One is the basic step of just keeping an eye out for when you’ve pushed her beyond kid-sized limits of not enough sleep, too hungry, too many other kids, that kind of stuff. Another is giving her practice “using her words” to deal with frustration before the stakes are so high.
I don’t think it crosses the line into bad daddy territory as long as you use some judgment. If she sees the dog get hit by a car or something like that, I assume you wouldn’t send her to her room for crying in that situation.
Better than just sending her to her room might be saying, “Use your words please!” Then, if she won’t, send her off.
Because that’s really your goal, to get her to express whatever it is, verbally instead of with tears. I have seen this work quite well, actually. Children cannot talk and cry at the same time, largely.
Once she starts in with the words the tears will subside.
Just be sensitive to the fact that sometimes little ones (or grownups for that matter) don’t always know what help they need. You might want to offer her a few stock solutions to non-obvious problems before scooting her on her way. Don’t endlessly try to find solutions, but a few calming techniques that you routinely offer might actually end up becoming part of her toolbox of solutions.
Such as- “You seem frustrated, will a big hug help?” or “Would reading a book together help?”
“Use your words” is a good suggestion. I used that all the time when my kids were little and it worked really well.
Another thing you might try to avoid is “rewarding escalation”. Sometimes I see situations in public where parents ignore all sorts of little cues that their kids are trying to get their attention. They keep drinking their coffee or having a conversation with another adult. Finally the kid starts crying and carrying on, which is impossible to ignore, and the parent responds.
The message being sent is “if you want me to pay attention to you, you need to make a fuss”. So, of course, fusses become more frequent and everybody is unhappy.
My wife and I tried to always respond as quickly as possible to cues that our kids wanted our attention. Now, sometimes the response might be “Honey, Daddy can’t do that right now. I’m in the middle of doing this other thing.” But the point was to send the message that approaching us quietly and politely was the best way to get noticed.
“Ask me in a way that makes me WANT to help you.” was another technique I came up with. It wasn’t enough for them to say “please”. They had to say it pleasantly, politely, and sincerely.
I do this. I tell my two-year old that she needs to learn to control her emotions. She groks that and responds immediately. Sometimes when she’s crying irrationally now, she’ll give herself a time-out and go in her room and do what she needs to do, and come out when she feels better. It tell her straight up that I don’t want to listen to her screaming in my ear for no reason, that she needs to go and calm down in her room.
To me that’s the definition of a time-out. It’s not a punishment. It’s time away from the situation to collect yourself. It works like a charm. My daughter rarely uses crying just to cry anymore. She’ll cry when she’s genuinely upset, but sometimes I am callous to it and tell her so. “No we can’t go to Dakota’s house right now. Deal with it.”
It sounds like you’re all doing a good job, not raising a bunch of drama queens (or kings). As someone who occasionally encounters children, I thank you. Keep up the good work.
I still use “use your words” with my 10-year-old stepdaughter when she becomes inarticulate out of rage, excitement, whatever.
When she was younger, I also used to point out when she was too difficult to understand because she was crying/asking for something in a baby voice, whatever.
Since your daughter is able to verbalize, it’s completely sensible to tell her that she needs time to calm down and collect herself so she can ask for what she needs/wants.
When I was crying and could not tell him why, he beat me with his belt “to give me something to cry about”.
When I showed my mother the bruises, she said "Don’t make your father mad.’
Ah yes, the parenting duo, along with, “What did you do that for?” when you limp into the house bleeding.
No, Frylock, you’re not being a bad daddy for not lavishing attention on your three year old who is just crying for attention. I think she’s at an age when she can start learning that the world doesn’t revolve around her. You’ll be going against the modern current of parenting, but it will be more healthy for your kids in the long run.
