My three-year-old was having a little attitude attack as my
wife and I were trying to coax her into joining me in bed for a nap. She was loudly insisting that my wife obey
her every command. “DON’T GO THERE! TAKE
THIS! DON’T MOVE!” As Mom casually went about her business in spite of these
directives, the little one got increasingly upset, and a tantrum started to
boil.
What would you have done?
Some people might have tried reasoning with the child,
explaining why yelling is bad, or napping is good. This approach may be successful here and there,
but the truth is that three-year-olds don’t have much of a sense of logic, and trying
to reason with them often leads to frustration on the part of both parties. In general I would not recommend reasoning as the method of
choice at this age.
Others might simply have gotten angry and yelled, or perhaps
spanked. You can muscle your way into
compliance, but it’s not a great long-term strategy. This is because children become habituated
and are no longer deterred by the same levels of force and anger, and also because
they age, meaning that after a certain point they’re bigger than you anyway. Additionally, yelling is usually what you do
when you have lost control, and that’s not where you want to be,
parenting-wise.
I chose to employ a classic and indispensable parenting technique,
namely, distraction. Read on:
“Mommy,” I said sweetly, did I ever tell you about the time
I went to the jungle?” Mommy looked at me skeptically, but played along. “No
Daddy, what happened?” Meanwhile, the
revved-up three-year-old was still pointing at my wife a grimace that would curdle
milk. “Well, I saw LIONS in the
jungle! They were big and scary and they
had big manes!” Mommy kept it up: “Really, Daddy?” “Oh yes.” The grimace lightened ever so slightly,
almost unnoticeably. “And you know what
else I saw? MONKEYS. There was a daddy
monkey, and a mommy monkey, and a baby monkey!”
In the blink of an eye the grimace was replaced by a look of
genuine concern: “Where was the sister monkey?” she questioned urgently,
turning towards me. “Oh, she was out
playing. And what do you think she was playing? Come over here and tell me!” I opened
my arms and beckoned to her from the comfort of my bed. And she toddled right into my embrace and lay
down as she thought about it. “Go Fish!”
she concluded. I carried on with my
story, naming animals I had seen in the jungle and garnering her input as I
went. (Note: I have never actually been
to the jungle, and you don’t have to have been either to make this technique work
for you.)
Some lessons to learn from this incident: first of all,
distraction is a great technique to prevent/avoid tantrums, arguments, and other
typical unwanted behaviors your three-year-old has in his/her repertoire. Second, distraction might mean more than just
pointing out the window and saying, “Look! A bird!” – although that is
certainly something that works too at times (usually if the situation has not
heated up so much yet, or if your young one particularly loves birds, or if
there’s actually something really unusual out the window to see, like if the
bird in question is, say, an emu).
Finally, you see from this story that you don’t even have to
be terribly creative. The trick is
grabbing the child’s interest. Your
child is probably interested in many of the same things mine is – animals,
trains, water, and so on. Cite those
things in a story (which obviously does not need to be of literary quality, or even
realistic), a question, or a list to shift your child’s focus. Anyone can pull this off – give it a shot!
Will this technique always work? Of course not. It’s just one of many tools you can try. No tool will work every single time, but as
you read above, a good distraction maneuver can be surprisingly effective.
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