oyie tempers flare

[Aliy]

my two and a half year old is driving me nuts. he argues about everything even things he wants he argues about. he is getting into everything. I can't leave anything on the counters food wise or he is getting into it.

we have coloured plates and cups for the kids. even if we give him the choice he gets upset that the doesn't have whatever his brother has. ( the two boys are aguesing and pestering eachother regularly, but thats a different post for a different day)

I jsut don't know what to do. I know some of this is due to the change of having the new baby in the house ( he is 5 weeks)

I just don't know what to do i feel like there isn't much I can do to make him happy right now. He is a very attached little guy and loving and can be so well behaved but right now everything is "me do it" "me first" and "NO!!!" it just drives me crazy!!!! 

[ckmannel]

Yep.  Sounds about right.  My two and a half year old infuriates me EVERY SINGLE DAY, and to be fair, I guess I infuriate him everyday too.  Violent outbursts, screaming, fighting every little request, breaking every rule, I know how you feel.  I have been trying to follow the ideas from Positive Discipline and Parenting with Love and Logic.  Heavy emphasis on trying.  Basically when he begins these outbursts, I do my best to disengage.  He can learn that negative behaviors don't get attention (good or bad) and people won't want to play with him while he acts like that.  It doesn't always work, and i won't say I never lose my temper, but that is about the only success I've had dealing with this phase.  Good luck.  If you have a revolutionary breakthrough, let me know how you did it.

[SeekingSerenity]

Originally Posted by ckmannel 

If you have a revolutionary breakthrough, let me know how you did it.

Me too. 'Cause, yeah, this sounds pretty much just like my Lil' Man. He's 33 months, will be 3 in July, and some days I just wanna hide in the closet when he starts being contradictory. He is just now becoming verbal, so the majority of his communication is either high-pitched screams or words that I can't quite make out. That's part of his frustration, I know, the inability to get across exactly what he wants to say. A big part of it is just the age, though. He fights constantly with the other two kids, because if they have it, he wants it. If they look at it, he wants it. If they set it down for two milliseconds, it's instantly and forever his. He picks his plate color at dinner and then screams that the spoon is wrong, or vice-versa. He gets his drink and instantly wants mine instead. He even threw the world's biggest hissy fit because he decided he wanted to sleep in big sister's bed last night, and when it was actually time for bed, she flipped out when he wouldn't move... then I let her lay on my bed and he went nuclear because that's HIS spot.

Good luck... keep us posted on that breakthrough. LOL!

[SeekingSerenity]

Hmmm... double post....

[MissBeth705]

I was so grateful to read your posts to know I'm not alone. I have the same thing going on with my 2.5 year old and like Aliy, we have a 4 week old. DS is literally climbing the furniture. My very first day alone with both kids I called DH ranting that I was going to leave DS and he needed to come home. He couldn't and I just wanted to cry. Needless to say this didn't make me feel very confident in my parenting abilities and now I feel like having another baby was such a huge mistake because DS is so awful right now. On top of that, I feel like a total fraud because I used to teach preschool and was a behavior therapist so I used to teach parents how to improve their kids behavior and now my kid is TERRIBLE. :(