We call it the Tyrannical Threes. My older one, now 7, was an angel all through his toddler hood. The younger one, now 4, is currently for sale on Craigslist.
I’m sorry, the username/content cracked me up here.
So sorry, LiLi.
Local Best Friend’s daughter is 3 1/2 and also…challenging.
She flushed all her earrings down the toilet the other day and persistently lied about their location for about a day before confessing.
We went to Mass together on Ash Wednesday and she spent most of it telling her mother about how she was STARVING. At least she said it very quietly. But persistently. This after ingesting a sandwich, some Cheerios, and I don’t remember what else. She was repeatedly told that she had to wait until they got home to eat anything else (also very quietly). I’m told that they got home, she had a BITE of something and then went to bed. :rolleyes:
But she can also be the cutest, most loving child ever. And that’s why she’s allowed to live.
Be warned - Peppa Pig is a terrible role model. She’s selfish, self-obsessed, abuses her father and brother and is the reason my child feels the need to jump in **every friggin’ muddy puddle **she sees. I recommend Curious George instead.
My experience has been that all kids reach this moment in time when they are realizing that the world will not, in fact, be rolling at their feet like a loving puppy ready to do their bidding. It is a complicated and stressful time, as they try out eveything they can think of to make the worlld start behaving again as it did when they were infants; and it’s an immensely painful lesson. Those parents who try to save their children from this realization create monsters (I’ve dated guys who were finally learning this in their twenties! :eek: )
Helping them to see the things they do have control over can ease the transition. I put Celtling in charge of turning off the lights at bedtime, for example. So instead of a poor victim being forced into bed, she became master of the lights, putting the house to sleep. Being kindly consistent about the things they do not control is also helpful. If I say it’s time for bed now, that’s not going to change, no matter what you do.
With Celtling, it’s hard to judge because I’ve been very lucky. She is largely a reasonable child to begin with, although never obedient. (Can’t imagine where she gets it from! 
) But one thing that really worked was refusing to understand her when she whined or threw fits. I would sit calmly beside her and just ask “What is it darlin’? Can I help?” but until she calmed down and spoke to me I would show no sign of understanding what the problem was. “Can you tell me calmly?” Then I would praise her for being calm, and occasionally reward the calm with a compromise (i.e. no you can’t stir the boiling pot, but these green beans need to be buttered, can you put some butter in and stir them up for me?)
Also, if tired or low on blood sugar (that was my first thought on seeing the title BTW. If they can’t get themselves under control it’s down to blood sugar level every time.) they will be unable to switch to a new thought on their own. They need help finding something else to focus on. Re-direction is your friend.
The really tough part is judging when it’s physical and when it’s a discipline problem. With Celtling it happened rarely, and was almost always the former. I tried to err on the side of consoling rather than disciplining, and the outcome for her has been marvelous.
Yeah, we’re starting to get the lying now 
We asked why all daughter’s books were on the bedroom floor and were told “Roxanne did it”. Roxanne is a particularly badly-behaved child at nursery, so the behaviour fits, but Roxanne lives 10 miles away and is unlikely to have wandered into the bedroom to muss up the bookshelves.
There was an interesting piece on a Derren Brown show which showed a group of 3-5 y/old kids in a mock-classroom. There was a big red button in the middle of the room and the kids were told “On no account touch this button”.
They were then left alone with hidden cameras watching; after a couple of mins they all pushed the button (which set off some kind of alarm.
When the adult came back and asked what happened, the kids instantly concocted a detailed story about a strange man who’d come in and pushed the button, but that it absolutely, positively wasn’t them wot did it.
This is reminding me of my neice’s Great Banana Tantrum. It started off innocently enough with “Mommy, I want a banana.” SIL takes banana, peels it, cuts it in slices, presents to Niece, who has curly strawberry blond hair, gray eyes, and adorable freckles (it’s protective camouflage, I tell ya).
“No I wanna peel the banana!” SIL eats sliced banana, pulls a banana off the bunch, presents unpeeled banana to Niece.
“I WANNA PICK THE BANANA!!!” SIL eats second banana ( 
) and with that “no jury would ever convict me” look in her eyes presents entire bunch of bananas to Niece. Niece rips banana off bunch, stares at it, hurls it on floor.
"I HATE BANANAS!!!" and runs off screaming like a banshee into the next room where my brother corralled her and hauled her upstairs still screaming her head off.
Last night dear daughter threw a temper tantrum at the in-laws because the dog ate her piece of garlic bread which she had carefully laid on the floor. “I want my bread!” Over and over and over. MIL tries to offer her another piece, but no, that won’t do. She wants the piece that the dog has eaten and will not accept that we can’t go down the dog’s throat and get it for her. Screamed half the way home until she fell asleep. Poor thing, it really was just because it was bedtime and she was tired, but I really hate the totally irrational fits because you just can’t talk them out of it.
sigh
Last night we received some new dresses I had ordered for Celtling from Land’s End. She loved them.
So naturally, she wanted to wear her new purple dress to school this morning. !?! And I’m sure she was confused because I normally would never push her to wear a certain thing over another. But. it’s. St. Patricks. Day.
I sat down with the reunion album and we looked at the pictures of the family farm. I showed her the map of Ireland, and talked about St. Patrick and the snakes. (No interest at all, she’s such the little scientist! LOL!) I explained about the importance of heritage and family while paging through the photo album.
I explained that wearing green today was a way of showing our pride in all this.
“I can be proud in purple, Mommy!”
::sniff:: That’s wonderful darlin’ I am so proud of you, and proud to be your Mommy!
Then inspiration struck. I quietly helped her into the purple outfit, and tucked the green one into her bag. When we got to school, I lifted her up to look into the classroom before I opened the door.
Her panicked look at the sea of green before her was met by my Cheshire Cat grin and and just a tad of the green dress pulled out of the bag so she could see I had brought it. She giggled with relief and threw her arms about my neck. I got a kiss and a thank you while we walked to the bathroom to change.
Now and again you win one. In this case two.
This thread reminds me of a conversation my grandmother and I had after our adoption started settling in and we had normal kid behaviours of constantly wanting attention, asking why incessantly and tantrums.
‘Grandma, why didn’t anyone tell me?’ I asked.
‘Because you wouldn’t have believed us,’ she said.
All of parenting feels like that. It’s like assembling a model that you really want to put together the right way but no one gives you any instructions and you aren’t sure what the final product should look like.
Gotta say, it’s the hardest thing I have ever taken on. And I wouldn’t have believed anyone if they had tried to tell me what it was really like.
Of course not. Because these stories all sound like anomalies. You think (before you’re a parent) that *your *three year old would never act like that, because you’re going to be a *good *parent.
Then in four years you’re stepping over thrown bananas and thinking, “WTF?” 
Nope, mine’s a month younger, healthy as a horse, and twice as batshit insane.
You stepped over one? Yesterday I stepped in one. Luckily it was in the driveway, although this raises the question of how a peeled banana came to be lying in my driveway in the first place.
I’ve learned not to investigate these things too deeply.
I have an 18 year old, too. More than a decade of practice avoiding bananas, Lego, racecars, hairbrushes, Gameboys, little plastic tchotckes from Mickey D’s… I don’t dance through my house because I’m happy, it’s a defense mechanism derived from years of painful lessons!
…and cat puke. I’m not sure which is nastier, stepping on a Lego or cat puke. One is ouch, the other is ooze.
OK, so now I’m off the phone and can post in earnest.
Remember when our kids were babies and I wrote you a treatise on our modified Ferber routine? Now I’m doing an almost total about-face and going to recommend a book I just started reading, Unconditional Parenting, by Alfie Kohn.
Claire is extremely smart and extremely impulsive, immature, and emotional. I started doing timeouts and consequences to try to get her in line, and was not having great success. Some online friends were talking about timeouts being “withdrawal of love,” and I scoffed, but I was open minded enough to read this guy’s articles and then buy the book.
It’s radical and shocking, but I think it really makes sense. It’s about “working with” kids instead of “doing to” kids. It might be worth a read, see what you think. It’s not about letting kids run roughshod over you at all, which was one of my concerns. It seems to be working with Claire, though I haven’t been doing it long!
Thanks! I’ll look for that book. I just want to keep him alive until he reaches four, at this point.
Legos are the new caltrops. Anyone breaking into our house better be prepared for either blinding pain or the CrunchcrunchCrunchcrunch of Legos underfoot.
Heh. I don’t have kids, but the thread made me want to post this.
A while back, I was reading a website (that someone here probably linked to). It was a humorist writing about his infant daughter. One of his points was that with an infant, it was way easier to solve the ineffable “whaddya want to do tonight, honey?” question. The answer, instead of “I dunno, you?” was nearly always “Keep the baby from turning blue.” “Sounds good! Let’s go!”
Except here, it’s “Keep me from turning the baby blue,” I guess.
God I love this story. I read it over and over and even told my SO of it.
I don’t have any children. Sometimes I think about my life and wonder if I have made the right choices.
Then I read a thread like this and I know I did the right thing.
How any of your keep from murdering your children is a mystery to me.
As follow-up (and encouragement to the OP that yes, the desire to kill them WILL go away… someday) that niece is now 8 and a very nice reasonably well-behaved kid who does not throw fruit around.