Heads up: This post is 14 years old. My thinking may have evolved since then — read it with that in mind.
Aug 8th
A couple of weeks ago, Janet Lansbury reposted a story from a RIE parent, the gist of it was, the mom calmly sets boundaries and consequences, when her 2 year old son threw sand at her face, she acted, allowed him to cry and released his emotions, and then took him home. 5 hours later, after he had slept and was all rested up, he came to apologize to her out of the blue.
It was unbelievable! My son is also 2 years old and he definitely isn’t as eloquent in his speech. Now I had only started this RIE thing with him a couple of months ago, but still I can already see that his whole personality is different when he’s around me Vs. when he’s around his mom or the helper. Through learning the RIE’s way, I’ve definitely learned to read him a lot better now. For example, yesterday, we were riding in the car when he wouldn’t stop moving around, hitting the windows, throwing things from the backseat pockets, etc… His mom tried to offer him food, drinks and other things to calm him down, but I could see that he was tired and needed an adult’s help, so I set the boundaries and when he broke it, I calmly told him: “I can see that you’re tired and you can’t control yourself anymore, so I’m going to hold you in your seat by my side.” He stopped acting up immediately and sat there in my arms, leaning against my body. Within 2 minutes, he was asleep. I told my wife that I’ve learned this from Janet Lansbury’s blog. At times like these, they’re telling us to please help stop them, and we need to change from offering them more choices to removing them.
Similarly today, when he began to get tired before noon, he started acting up again, his mom was losing patience with him and I knew I had to set the “go to bed” consequence. So I calmly told him that if he threw the hard toys again, I’ll have to take him inside the room. (Actually not a good, related consequence. I need to find a more natural step in here.) Sure enough, he threw one on purpose, and I told him “OK, I have to take you in”. He started crying and throwing a tantrum as I tried to pick him up. I let him lay on the floor and said “You can cry, I know you’re upset I need to take you away, but I already said I didn’t want you to throw the hard toys, it may hurt your sister if you threw it at her. How about this? Would you like to bring a book to bed with you?” Once again, he responded calmly, picked his favorite book and walked into the room with me. Within a few minutes, he was asleep!
The big incident was he threw and broke his glass bottle while mom & the helper were busy attending to his sister. We were all startled by the sound of broken glass, I was pretty calm but I think my tone of voice still had a little bit of “annoyance” in it. I told him I didn’t want him to throw glass and food, this broken glass is dangerous… bla bla bla.“ Unfortunately, I think I broke his concentration on the situation at hand. He started wandering off while I was “nagging” him. Still, I put on a sad face and when he talked to me, I told him I’m not happy because he broke the glass bottle. And then we parted ways, he left with his mom and I went out to work.
When I see him at home after dinner, we played with his trains for a little bit and then went to bed together. While in the room, he needed help opening the water bottle, I asked if he needed help and then helped him. He then took the bottle, drank some water, and then said to me: “Daddy… Sawwy” (Sorry).
I said “Thank you” and give him a hug and a kiss. I actually have no idea what he was apologizing about, but just the fact that he knows, and didn’t needed one of us adults to force him to “Say sorry!”, made me so happy :)