Please help: What do you do in this situations

[seamama11]

My daughter is a little over 2 and my son is almost 4. They love each other, and mostly play well. But lately, they are constantly yelling at each other, not playing nicely, and getting on each other's nerves. They spend all day together, minus 4 hours a week when my son is at nursery school. When we are on nature walks, in backyard, at park, or out and about they are absolutely wonderful. They share, look out for one another, and great with transitions, getting dressed, eating...
But when we are home they bicker. And it is driving me nuts.
My patience is wearing thin. We have never put any kid in a timeout, and I like that we haven't gone done that route.
My issues are this: My kids are not listening.
Please tell me what you would do in this situation.
1. Rule: no running in the house. The kids run and run. Should I have them sit down until they can walk, or should I carry them until they can walk? This morning at 8 am we were on our way outside to play and they are running around like crazy. DH is very sick and my parents who live downstairs were sleeping. I felt like I snapped I picked up my almost 4 year old and said firmly, NO RUNNING. What do you do when there are simple rules (and not many of them) and they don't follow me
2. The kids are coloring nicely together and my son just decides to crumble my dd's picture. He won't come talk to me about it, and won't talk to dd about it. He is generally very good about apologizing without being prompted, or making it better with a hug...but lately he is very stubborn.
3. My ds is saying things like "stupid" "god dammit" (which we are trying not to say anymore since I am sure he heard it from us. What is the natural consequence for saying bad words.
That is all I have time for now, but you catch my drift.
Thanks

[Llyra]

1. With the running I think you may be asking too much. Little ones will run, and trying to make them stop may be just asking for frustration. I have managed, however, to confine the running to the great room, basement, and their own bedroom. I don't allow running in the kitchen or in my bedroom, or in the upstairs hallway because my stairs aren't gated. What I do is if they run, I pick them up (the littler ones) or direct them (the over-4s) to a more appropriate place to run. Over and over and over, calmly, without comment other than "don't run in here," until they work out that there's no point in resisting.

2. With the crumpled picture- we call this "being a nudge," meaning doing something unkind for no good reason other than to draw attention to yourself or get a reaction. I try and analyze the motive, before I decide what to do. If he's really just trying to get a reaction, from me or from her, I'll pick him up, move him to another location, and ignore him. Or I might confine him to the couch until he's ready to discuss it. I think the appropriate consequence for not playing fairly and nicely is to be removed from the play for awhile. This is one situation where I think a timeout works nicely, but not necessarily one in isolation from others. Sometimes the older ones put on a big reaction-- yelling and screaming and turning red-- and the littler ones will deliberately try to provoke that because to them, it's funny. In this case, talking to the older one about good solutions other than flipping out, can really help. My DD1, for instance, will pick up all the coloring tools and take them to her own bed, leaving the little ones high and dry, and that helps a lot, too.

3. I don't do anything about bad words other than ignore them, and mind my own language carefully. I think that anything at all that you do just draws attention to them, makes them into something you can say to get attention and get a reaction from others and feel rebellious. If you ignore them completely, meaning don't even look at the child or answer the child, but just calmly walk out of the room when it happens if you can't stop yourself from saying something, the thrill wears off and they stop all on their own. You have to get the other adults in their life on board, too.

There's no better solution to cuss words than keeping the kid from hearing them, however. If he hears them from people, he's going to imitate them.

[Kreeblim]

We have two 5 year olds and an almost 2 year old. The two older ones have an understanding that you don't HAVE to play with the other kid, so if there is conflict that is degenerating into yelling or violence the kids either work it out themselves or don't play together. Sometimes I'll offer suggestions like taking turns with a toy or whatever so they can both play with it, but generally I stay out of it except to enforce the splitting up if the yelling and fighting doesn't stop. At this point, they are REALLY good at working things out on their own, for instance I can hand them a cookie and they will talk amongst themselves about the best way to split it I can't even remember the last time I had to ask them to not play with each other anymore because they were fighting.

The most important part, was just explaining to them logically that we don't hurt or yell at each other, therefore if they can't figure out a way to play without doing those things, they would need to play apart. I think if I had done it in anger or worded it harshly like a punishment or had also taken away toys then they would not have gotten the right message.

When it comes to the older kids playing with the younger, we've just been explaining to the older ones from birth that he is much littler and needs to learn how to be nice and share, but in the mean time he kinda sucks at it. They give him much more leeway than they do each other, for instance if he walks over and takes one of their toys they'll ask for it back, then try to barter another toy for it, then either let him have it for a bit or start playing with him. Sometimes they'll be a little disappointed, but they know he will get bored with it SUPER quick and then they can get it back. He's actually just starting to share back and forth so sometimes he'll hand it back if asked now.

I'm not sure how no running in the house would work for us because I've never been in that situation. We have tried to do the "indoor voice" rule to moderate success during the baby's naptime, but we kinda cheated and made nap time into computer game time.

Is the picture thing a regular occurrence? He might not be sorry, so the lack of apology might not be stubbornness. After trying to talk to your son about it, I'd probably offer sympathy to the other kid. Something like "Wow, I'm really sorry that happened to your picture, would you like me to help you find a private spot to color while your brother calms down?". We did have issues with destructiveness by the oldest, but they were always odd cases and never really a pattern so we took it incident-by-incident.

We use words we shouldn't sometimes too (DH is a klutz and we're doing most of the work on the house ourselves...lol) and though we try very hard to NOT say "bad words" we realized a few things:

a) We will slip up.
b) They will still hear the words from others.
c) There are no natural consequences for saying bad words because they are just words.

We didn't want them to look at the words as "forbidden" or having some sort of power when in reality they are just crude and distasteful. When it comes to actual swear words, we eventually explained that the words are very rude to say, so if they hear us say those words, they can remind us that those words are bad. We will do the same if they say them (though they pretty much stopped once we gave them the power to correct us). We also explained that other adults REALLY hate those words and might yell or something when they hear kids say them while we're out.

As for milder words like "stupid", we role-played different ways to use stupid in a non mean way. Like "If I get a gift and it's not EXACTLY what I want, is it OK to call it stupid? Or would that be mean?" and "If I trip over a log while we're hiking, is it OK to say OUCH STUPID LOG!!!, or would that be mean?". We talked about different ways to use the word instead of just calling it bad and trying to make it off limits.

I think it's great that your 2 year old is already so good at sharing though...I know a few two year olds that wouldn't even share the air if they didn't have to

[butterfly_mommy]

I have a 2 year old DS and I care for a 3 year old girl during the week. They mostly get along really well but they do occasionally have disagreements. If they are not physically or mentally hurting each other I let them work it out. If someone is getting hurt either physically or emotionally I step in ans stop the behaviour "We don't yell/hit/etc at each other in this house" then I ask "Does somebody need something?" or I comfort the crying child and validate their feelings "oh you sound sad/scared/hurt/etc" then I ask if they need help working out something. "Hmm it looks like maybe you both need to colour in different places" or "J is really sad that you scrunched his picture, are you trying to tell us something?"

I also did this when I worked in childcare centres prior to having my children.

Bad words I ignore or I may say "People don't like to hear that word" if it seems like he is just trying out the word. Or if I slip and say something and he says it right after me I say "I'm sorry that was not a polite word for Mama to say, I was feeling frustrated/mad/etc"

As for the running in the house thing. This is something I deal with daily, DS loves to run and often proclaims "I only run" or "lets run now" anyway I never say "don't run" as it is difficult to process the negative and all they hear is "RUN" I say "Walking/Walk" or "We walk in the house" Then I make sure to take him to lots of safer places to run like the park, unused sports fields, non-busy mall etc. The science centre in our city has a huge long carpeted hallway that is empty as is is an alternative entrance/exit and DS and my Daycare child love to gleefully run up and down it. We also go to gymnastics and they get to run on the soft tumble floor. It's fun to run inside too! Now DS will ask me "I run?" before he takes off most of the time.

[zepchic]

I just wanted to chime in on the cursing part of your ?.

My ds got on a roll with saying s*** It drove me and dh nuts! We tried ignoring it, talking to him about not saying it, putting him in time out, I even heard this trick about when they say it give them a different word that rhymes instead. None of this worked! He was saying the word a lot, like 20-30x a day...to get a reaction I guess. Even when we had no reaction he continued to do it.

Anyway...what I did worked in one day. I got out a package of sweet tarts (I know..bad mommy). THey were small packs with like 8 candies. I put them on the counter and I told him every time he said that word I would throw one of his candies in the garbage-whatever was left he could eat after dinner. So when he said the word I made him get up and watch me put the candy in the garbage. The first piece of candy I threw away made him cry. He cursed about 3-5 times that first day. Maybe once the second day and hasn't cursed since then. I only gave him the candy for 2 days, so it is not like I traded a cursing habit for a candy habit.

If you can find something that holds similar value to your child it might work. Good luck! I was so happy that this worked so quickly!