Heads up: This post is 14 years old. My thinking may have evolved since then — read it with that in mind.
Does your 2 ~ 3 year old toddler give you any of these troubles?
Says NO automatically when you ask him anything
Doesn’t listen to or ignore what you are saying or asking (multiple inconsistent messages)
Throw things, tip over things, hit things… hard!
Flip over her bowl of food or throw it away completely
When he’s tired / hungry, doing all the “forbidden” things no matter how stern you tell him you don’t want him to do that
These are some of the troubles we’re facing currently. In this post, I’ll specifically talk about 4 – “Flip over bowl of food or throw it away” first, as it’s one of the main behavior I need to correct right now.
When I first started writing this post, the title was actually “RIE is really making a difference in my child”! After we started doing our “parents organized playgroups” and learning about RIE, I had seen such a big improvement in my relationship with my son! It was like we had become soul mates! Oh how naive I was to think that I had figured things out! I guess as a first time dad, your relationship with your toddler is like when you dated your first girlfriend when you were 15 years old. :) Anyway, here’s the story.
Up until a few months ago, I had relied on my wife and domestic helper to take care of L. Although I knew I wanted to use the Reggio Emilia Approach to raise my child, I didn’t think we need to start until L reaches 2 or 3. I thought that as he gets older and starts to understand more, I’ll let him have lots of freedom to explore and construct his own knowledge. Now I know that this thinking was wrong!
What happened with L was, all this time, everyone has been denying him of a few basic rights because “he’s a baby” and that has caused some behavioral issues now that he’s 2 years old. Let me use meal time and his current “throwing bowls and plates away” problem as an example. How did things escalate and reach this stage? Here it is, a step-by-step montage:
Since baby, we locked him into a high chair and force fed him until he finished the whole bowl of baby food
He began to realize he was full or didn’t want to eat anymore, complained with sad face but was ignored
Discovered “self” and really began to dislike being force fed. Began to struggle to get out of the high chair
Used hands to stop the spoons and the bowls from coming near his mouth. Found out that if he caused the bowl to turn over, the adult will finally stop!
Throwing food away to indicate “I don’t want to eat anymore” became a habit
Dad came in and try to solve the “problem” by offering him choices. Asked him to bring his own table and chair and we’ll leave him to eat by himself
Helper afraid he would make a mess, tries to help him, but he now has a short fuse and if he is even slightly displeased with something the helper did “for” him, he would swipe at the bowl, sending it to the floor!
Now at this point, our moms would say he’s a bad boy, and that we should spank him! But has anyone actually trace back and find out why the boy is acting this way? Do you still think we should spank him after reading the above story of how things developed?
The truth is if we had respected L’s will early on and let him control how much he wants to eat, then he wouldn’t have developed the throwing problem at all! Throwing the food away to indicate end of meal is so ingrained in him that now even when I let him eat by himself while he’s calm and content, he would still turn over his plate when he finishes!
By not trusting our baby and forcing something on him, we have created behavioral problems that are exponentially harder to correct! So much so that even my wife considered if she had to resort to spanking (On a different behavior.)
Don’t just take my word for it, watch this amazing video of babies behaving gently and maturely! It can be done! (Janet Lansbury – Gentle Discipline in Action, Seeing is Believing[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0IK2SlHn7o?wmode=transparent]
With our 3 month old daughter now, we know better and we can see that even at 3 months old, she already has the will to “construct her world view”, and deserves our respect rather than treating her as a baby doll! The interesting question is with our boy, what should we do to correct these problems? Especially when he has another issue with listening because he grew up with our helper’s constant nagging so he has learned to tune out his ears already!
What would you do?