Long time lurker on MDC. Something came up multiple times today, including at his small and sweet in-home Waldorf preschool. I need the collective wisdom of the gentle discipline board.
First, let me say that I know that 3.5 yrs old is too young to have empathy. That is clear to me. But, it unclear to me how to model empathy with my very spirited & only child (and boy) because he resists serious conversations with laughter.
Example #1: Kid takes the toilet paper and runs it under the sink while I am wiping a particularly messy poop. When I admonish - “M, we don’t put the toilet paper under the water because it ruins it and that is wasteful” – he laughs at me. It is that I’m-going-to-push-your-buttons laugh. Because this is an ongoing issue (the toilet paper thing), I tell him he needs to stop laughing and take this seriously or he will need to have a time-out. When he doesn’t, I follow up with a time out which basically consists of sitting on his bed for 2 minutes (and I will sit with him if he asks).
Example #2: Kid hits the dog on purpose, laughing. I separate him and institute a time-out. At the end of the time out, we talk about what went wrong. (I usually ask him to narrate the situation.) A lot of times he retells while laughing but I can tell it is a laugh of embarrassment.
Example #3: Preschool teacher tells me that he hit a girl (usually his best friend) with a train, causing her to cry. When the teacher admonished, he laughed. She wants me to help me emphasize to him not to laugh when people are crying. I asked if he was ‘naughty’ laughing or embarrassed laughing, but she couldn’t say. Her solution was to emphasize our ‘heavy hearts’ when he hurts our feelings and/or laughs at our feelings. We love his waldorf experience for a lot of things, but this is not one where we agree as we have always been VERY consistent about naming specific feelings (I feel sad because…; that little girl is angry because you have her toy).
So, the question is how do I teach him to stop laughing if he does it both to get a rise AND as an embarrassment coping mechanism. I should also add that the later probably comes, in part, because we use a lot of playful parenting techniques (and the time-outs are actually fairly rare – at most 2 times in a day but more often than not only a couple a week). Is this a losing battle with a 3.5 year old? Is there something you do in your house that works and why?
