I need y'all to know, I used this thread yesterday. Yes, it was my own advice, but I'd FORGOTTEN my own best practices.
We were at Disneyland at the time, too!
My youngest was doing his pouting thing. It's not really tantrum level anymore, but when he's NOT happy, he lets EVERYONE know. I was with another Padder and we were talking about this thread, actually. I realized I hadn't taken away ME. I was feeding his pout!
So I stopped. I just started ignoring him. I stopped trying to talk him out of the pout. I stopped trying to lecture him out of the pout. I just started to ignore him.
Another thing I got from her that was fabulous - we had 5 boys between the two of us - and there was an argument as we were loading up the car to come home. J wanted to sit next to M, C wanted to sit with P, J wanted the back seat, M wanted the middle seat (S didn't care he just wanted it all to stop.) So other mom said "I'm going to count to TEN and if you all don't figure this out, I will." I'm totally down with the "if you don't figure this out, I will" but I've never added the counting thing to give them that guideline. As soon as they said it, J was a lot more into finding a compromise. She was clearly counting slow enough to give them time to get everyone moved around. By 4, the kids were saying "you can stop counting! We're doing it!!" and she did.
This could totally work in so many situations at the parks, too.
So I'm totally going to do that. I think I fix the problems WAY too often, in the interest of time. Now I have a tool to manage how long it takes them to fix the problem themselves. SCORE!
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