Simply Mother

A discussion with Jade (3):

Me: Okay, let’s do that after your nap tomorrow.
Her: Nooooo, I want to do it before my nap.
Me: Okay, that sounds good, we’ll do it before your nap.
Her: Noooooo, I want to do it IN my nap.
Me, accepting futility : Okay, that sounds good.
Her, slightly perplexed but not about to give it up: Nooooo, I want to do it after my nap.
Me: Okay Jade, sounds good.
Her: Noooooo . . .

It’s a phase, right?

She’s a funny child. And sweet. Lately, she’s also in a phase where she pretty much wants to do the opposite of whatever you want her to do. I guess these two are both related to some developmental shift she’s going through right now, but . . . tiresome.

• If Sarah expresses concern that someone might knock her recently-built block city down, Jade suddenly morphs into a magnet, the blocks her polar opposite, pulling her in.
• If I put on a sad phase and talk about the toy mess that has been created, asking for help, she smiles and starts running around wreaking havoc on the already disastrous living room.
• When met with even the slightest hint of a “correcting” tone of voice, she turns her head, smiling slightly, looking everywhere but the source.

And really, when kids are like that, I know they can’t “hear” me. There is honestly no point in trying to give guidance to a child who doesn’t want to listen. The only way I could get her to listen to me would be to increase the volume or “sternness” of my voice, and then, well, all she’s hearing is the tone and she usually bursts into tears.

So continuing to talk to a purposefully non-attentive child is fruitless at best, and I’m unwilling to resort to harsher and harsher tactics, so what is there left to do when something needs to be change?

Get Creative

Creativity is the only answer, as far as I can come up with. It’s also very difficult to manage when you’re faced with the frustration that is a 3-year-old who can’t listen.

But we do sometimes; here’s an example from Sunday. We were driving the short distance home from church and Jade had announced that she was hungry. All attempts to explain how we would be eating in less than five minutes, we don’t have any food in the car, do you want us to make it out of thin air, etc., etc., were met with a relentless chorus of “I need food now. I need food NOW. I NEED FOOD NOW!”

I saw the little “belly pad” that goes to a carseat but wasn’t attached–it’s a circle with a slit cut in the middle to fit the bottom part of the buckle, but at that moment it looked exactly like a head with a perfect little mouth. I picked it up and made it talk to Jade.

“I’m SO hungry. I need food NOW. Do you have anything I can eat?”

Instantly, I mean instantly, it was amazing, my little angry chanting child became most pleasant.

“Oh yes,” she said in her charming little voice, “What would you like, I have some apples?” (As she dug into the depths of her carseat for something pretend-edible.) “Or carrots? Which would you like?”

She continued to feed the belly pad for the rest of the way, and then asked to bring it inside and keep playing. Then she snacked on apples and waited without a hassle for me to cook up something more filling.

Whenever we manage to respond to one of her more difficult moments like this (turning cleaning into a game, playing “I’m going to get you!” if she’s trying to bother her sister), it not only works wonders in the short-term, she is also much more pleasant and easy going for hours afterwards. As opposed to the times when I forget and keep on talking, getting more and more coercive, which only leads to escalated “difficulties” the rest of the day.

Filed in: child development • parenting | August 20, 2009