My daughter has gotten to the shrieking when she doesn’t get her way stage. Today we were at a friend’s house waiting for him to get home with his roommates who we don’t know.
My daughter started to shriek just because my wife took off her shoes so that she wouldn’t stand on the furniture with dirty shoes on. I covered her mouth to muffle the squeels with my hand. I didn’t cover her nose and I uncovered her mouth when she inhaled. I was only trying to muffle the high pitched part of her shrieks by absorbing it with my hand. My wife wasn’t comfortable with this and that kind of pisses me off.
If this sort of physical discipline is not ok, what kind of physical discipline IS ok? I mean, you hear about it being almost epidemic that parents have teenagers who think it’s ok to call their Mothers fucking bitches over the slightest infraction. They don’t do anything they are told to do. I don’t spank my daughter. The only other thing I have done is smacked her hand when she reaches for things she’s not supposed to and even then she doesn’t even cry because I don’t do it so that it hurts. When we are home I pick her up and carry her to her room and close her in for a time-out until she stops screaming.
I mean WTF, how are we supposed to discipline what are basically wild animals that we have brought into this world?
I am not a fan of the notion that parents must discipline in the same way, or that everyone with whom the child has to deal should do so. My own experience has been that children respond best to learning techniques that are authentic to the individual and consistent by individual but that they are fully prepared to deal with different approaches between people.
That is, my husband and I have worked quite hard to be on the same page about what counts as “behavior to be corrected” and the degree to which it is considered naughty. On this too, we find it better not to be too obsessive – it does kids no harm to be allowed to figure out that people have different hot buttons.
We are obsessive about enforcing what the other has done/said/decreed, though, which sometimes has required a great deal of self discipline. It does do kids harm to learn that mom and dad can be played off against each other and it does the family relationships no good at all. Both I and my husband use forms of discipline the other would rather not see used from time to time, and it has been important for us to discuss those matters later, when the kids are not around. Both for the kids’ sake and for our own.
How you discipline your daughter may include physical intervention, or it may not. I know very good parents who have made each choice and there are a lot of areas in between. But the objective is not to control your child, nor is it to have a polite and obedient teen. It is to raise a woman, together. How that is achieved can vary wildly. There is no right answer to the question as you have asked it, because the real question is, how can you and your wife best raise your daughter. What anybody else does/approves of/avoids like the plague will nto help to resolve the problem.
I see no problem with covering her mouth gently, except that if she’s feeling truly bratty she might bite you. As an onlooker having to listen to the shrieks, I appreciate them being muffled, and I appreciate you being proactive in attempting to get her to change her behavior. I’ve listened to way too many shrieking children whose parents just stand next to them and ignore them (usually at the cell phone kiosk near my store)while the rest of the world looks around for duct tape.
Oh please, OP, if it happened the way you describe, you’re perfectly in the clear. That’s not even close to blipping my radar as abusive or “over the line”. You didn’t cause your daughter any pain and you didn’t cause any trama. If your kid needed to breathe, she’d have pulled away and took a breath or breathed through her nose. I can’t imagine she would think “Daddy’s trying to stop me from breathing!” I bet she got the message- she can’t scream like that.
Well thanks all. The shrieking definitely annoys me because it’s the rhythmic, ‘breathe-shriek-breathe-shriek’, that tells you it’s entirely intentional. I mean I have no doubt that she is getting her blood up, adrenaline and activating the sympathetic nervous system and all that, but you can tell that she is using it as a weapon. It really pisses me off even though I recognize she’s a two year old. Sometimes I think it’s cute even as I am getting pissed off and disciplining her.
It’s not abusive or anything, but it might not be the best disciplinary strategy. Kids want attention. It is their drug. It is what they crave. Personally I have found that one of the best ways of dealing with the shrieking stage is to simply ignore it, with a thousand-yard stare, as though it is not happening. Then when the kid stops shrieking eventually, remark on how nice it is to hear her normal tone of voice, etc. Obviously if you are in public, at a friend’s house, etc., you don’t want to just let this sort of thing continue, so I guess if you have to cover her mouth with your hand, go for it, but I wouldn’t personally want to set the precedent that screaming is OK as long as Daddy is covering up my mouth with his hand.
Or you could use a time-out for screaming, or something like that. There are different ways to handle it. I think your main problem here is that you are getting pissed off at your wife about how to handle it, and instead of working it out between the two of you, you are going to the Dope for validation. The Dope is not going to be there the next time your kid screams, and more than anything, you and your wife need to be consistent with your disciplinary strategy.
Why didn’t you just take her out? Out of the house, out of the room, whichever, and stay with her silently ignoring her screaming until she stopped? I don’t like the idea of covering her mouth, either. But if you can’t put her in time out since you were not at home, then she gets modified time out where she’s removed from the situation but not rewarded for it, either.
Taking her out is also a way to get Daddy’s attention, specially when it means that Daddy has to stay out as well.
What will work, we can’t tell since we don’t know the kid. But I third the “speak with your wife about it” - and please both remember that kids are short, not stupid. It kills me when my brother and The Other Family talk freely about whatever while the kidlet is playing in the same room and then wonder “how does he know that? We never told him anything about it!” (d’uuuuuuh[sup]n[/sup])
Well, daddy keeps her safe but otherwise gives her no interaction until she stops shrieking. If it were me, I’d put her down and tell her she’s in time out for two minutes, mark my watch and then walk a few feet away and not talk to her or look at her until the time out passed.
Yep. Why not at mass or the supermarket? Actually, especially at mass or the supermarket. And friend’s houses. Of course this is a phase that should pass, but that doesn’t mean others should be subject to shrieking. IMO, shrieking should be equated from being removed from the action and set apart like time out at home does. Hopefully, you wouldn’t have to do this more than a handful of times in public places and she’d learn what not to do.
Especially at church, you take the kid out. And the one time I took my kids out of the supermarket was one of the most effective lessons they ever got–they never acted like that in public again. Same with the library (when my oldest was 2.5 and thought it was hilarious to run through the stacks).
I don’t object to covering her mouth with a hand, just IME taking a child away from wherever it is, going someplace boring, and ignoring her is a consistent and effective method.
I’m a behavior therapist, which means I am kind of a parenting expert (;)), and I agree with those who say either ignore it or remove her to time out. It most definitely sounds like the shrieking is for attention, and what many people don’t realize is that negative attention is still attention. Attempting to physically restrain her or shouting, “No, stop that!” is adding fuel to the fire. There are very few kids who will keep up a behavior for more than a few minutes if you really ignore them, and that means no talking, no eye contact, no nothing.
At a friend’s house or in public, ignoring the behavior can be difficult because many disapproving onlookers will judge you because you’re not doing something. To avoid embarrassment and inconveniencing others, you can take her outside to the car, plop her in the backseat, and sit there quietly until she quits.
The sad thing, to me, is that you felt you needed to ask the question in the first place.
What you did was what I wish more parents would do, instead of letting their podlings scream their lungs out. I have been know to yell at them to shut their brat up and get profanity in return.
In my day it was common practice for parents to remove the child. You would see parents, “OK we’ll get off the bus at the next stop and wait for you to settle down.”
Or “Ok we’ll just miss the movie, get you a baby sitter and come back without you.”
She doesn’t get to do anything else while this is occurring and it only happens when out. When we are at home she gets a time-out until she stops screaming. It’s easy at home because I don’t have to do anything but let her out of her room once she’s stopped screaming.
That’s a bit of an assumption, my wife and I did work it out between us already.
We did just take her out when it was clear she wouldn’t stop. As soon as we got outside she was in a chipper mood.
Yeah then she just runs off to play.
No car, I live in New York City.
Because she’s two and she stands up when on furniture. Better to have her shoes off when she does that than on right?
Except with her going outside is it’s own reward. What I did was when we walked past the park I said, “Look it’s the park, you don’t get to go there, you’re going home and going to your room.” So I sort of did what you describe. But as soon as she got out she was perfectly chipper.