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Monday, July 6, 2015

Parenting Rough Patch

So, you know how I wrote about time outs in my last post? Well, around here they are becoming a daily fixture. We seem to have hit some kind of parenting rough patch. And by rough, I mean maybe we need like a four-wheeling type vehicle to traverse it. Very rough. Like maybe it's not a road anymore at all.

Our daughter has become a little volcano with a hair trigger, and she now has zero tolerance for things not going her way. Which, I might add, they continue to do. I have not even slightly tried to give her everything she wants, because that seems like it would be the worst idea ever. No, life continues as usual, it's just that Maeve hates everything now.

Okay, that's an exaggeration. But she is profoundly unhappy, a lot of the time. I mean, she has to buckle herself in, get herself to the bathroom when she needs to, and live with my schedule, all of which make her absolutely miserable. And misery loves company.

It's like she's three all over again, only with a much bigger body. And three was a very, very difficult time for us. There were some time-outs that lasted for the better part of a day, back then. And we are heading that way again.

I'm trying out some new carrot-and-stick maneuvers to both encourage better behavior and punish the worse, so we'll see if I get anywhere. But if you see fewer posts here and on FB, you'll know it's because I'm following the old adage: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all.

Catching some rain on the 4th.

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