Name Calling

[momtoTnT]

My very wonderful 3 yo ds has taken to name calling. It started with "idiot" - mostly directed at me. That went onto him calling me "id" since he knew that I didn't like the word idiot...

I'm not sure what to do! I HATE it. I hate name calling (especially idiot/stupid etc) more than I hate it when he gets physically agressive. We've talked a lot about how words can hurt, and it's not very nice to say things that can hurt people, and it seems that it is falling on deaf ears. We've also tried ignoring, time outs, taking possessions and putting them on time out - none of which has worked (the only one I really had hope for was ignoring. This spurred him on further).

Today, our babysitter, who has NEVER had to come to me about any issues stemming from my ds, told me that yesterday he was name calling a lot - directed at everyone - mostly "stupid" and variations of that.

Now, I know that most of this has come from movies. We've pretty much limited his movie time now to maybe 1 time a week and then only certain movies (some movies which he used to watch, we no longer do because of language and other things that he imitates that drive us bonkers). However, at grandma's house - where he goes 4 days a week for 2 hours, he does watch movies. About 90% of them are perfectly fine. And it's only after he's seen them that I find out he saw them (whole nother issue with my MIL : ).

Short of banning it all together, what should I do? Should I worry about it? Is this just a phase that 3 year olds go through?

I've found 3 to be a VERY challenging age, and I'm really not sure what is age appropriate and what isn't - both for behavior and discipline. Any help would be appreciated!

[mavery]

We're having issues with name-calling too. My ds usually goes for more made-up words, often combined with "butt", to make up his own names (e.g. "you're a fibity butt-butt"). But it's the tone of voice that makes them (to me) almost as objectionable as "idiot".

We've tried different things. We've talked about it endlessly, explained why we don't like it. Then we just said "no name-calling" and if he was doing it, e.g. at the dinner table, we would ask him to leave the table. If I'm in the middle of doing something and he's calling me names to try to get me mad so he gets more of my attention) I refuse to respond to the actual name-calling (beyond saying "When you're done calling names we can talk" or "I can't pay attention to what you're saying if you call me names. I won't listen to that.") Then as soon as I can I try to spend a few minutes playing with him, so he's getting positive attention.

ETA I see you said ignoring doesn't work. Don't you think that if you ignored it for long enough it would almost HAVE to work? If the goal of the behaviour is getting attention, then if it gets no attention why would he continue? I can imagine it might initially make things worse, since it has previously worked to get attention so the first response to being ignored is to try harder. But if you persisted....

If it's just general high-spirits, when I'm hanging out with him I sometimes encourage silly but friendly name-calling as an alternative (like "Hey, sweet-nose!" said in a nice tone of voice). He can get fairly into making up nice names.

I also HOPE that this exercise will pay off in terms of him understanding the effect of tone of voice. I think the nasty tone of voice has definitely been learnt from TV/movies. He doesn't watch a lot, but a couple of things that I thought would be okay turned out to be horrible (like the "Cars" movie, which I was very wary of and finally caved when friends told me it was fun and unobjectionable -- and then we lived through months of ds pushing other kids and speaking really unpleasantly because he was pretending to be the nasty racecar, Chick).