Hi. I am just wondering if anyone has an ‘explosive’ or spirited child who has problems with children’s parties and what you tend to do (and if they are older how long it lasted)
Also – an easy one I hope – I just can’t figure out what LO stands for and it’s not in the list of acronyms – it seems to be related to peoples children ? something offspring?
So for some background – DS1 is 5yold – has been ‘explosive’ all his life – sensitive baby, colicky, reflux, undiagnosed dairy allergy – then compounded by being dealt with by us in a punitive way – time outs etc which didn’t work – and we are a ‘shouty’ explosive family. I have been working on gentle discipline for about a year now – converted by reading Alfie Kohn’s Unconditional Parenting (as an aside – very good for dismantling the old tools but not so good for putting new tools in place) – I am now fully committed to gentle discipline in principle – I just struggle at times – I would probably have been a ‘spirited’ child myself and had a very controlling domineering shouty mother – hence that is the pattern I fall back on – to my regret immediately afterward. I think also because of that I find it hard to put boundaries in place in a consistent respectful way….
Anyway DS1 has always particularly struggled at children’s birthday parties – more noticeably so from 3y onwards when there have been expectations of certain behaviour like playing certain party games and when things don’t go exactly as he imagines or expects they will.
The ‘general’ level tantrums have decreased enormously in the last 6 months – which I had attributed to our change in parenting and him getting to have his say a whole lot more – and we had even had a few kids parties that had gone well…
And in between times he is a delightful sweet child who deals with one on one situations very well.
But then we had this one… His best mate who he hasn’t seen for a while (we shifted away from that part of town) was having his 6th birthday party. I couldn’t go and Dad was out of town so got a friend to take him (thinking it would all be OK). Now she has a very ‘direct’ style but I thought that might be OK (in the end it wasn’t). He came home with her saying it had been a nightmare and that when he didn’t get to play exclusively with his mate or get always to go to the front of the line for the game he would burst into tears and have a tantrum – as well as a whole lot of other behaviour that was unacceptable to her – not playing inclusively with the other kids (sounds like he only knew one or two of them), speaking rudely to her etc.
Now I do realize that I should have spoken through it more with him – talked about expectations of how the party would go etc – he gets very excited before these things and that makes it harder – he also (I think) had built up the expectation that he would get to play with his friend quietly by himself and was not happy to have to play physical games with others. But I feel I couldn’t have just said no he couldn’t go to the party as he was so attached to going. I also wish I had spoken to my friend about our strategies for dealing with his tantrums – I just didn’t think of it because it had been such a long time.
I am concerned because as he is getting older there is a growing expectation that kids be dropped off and left by parents at these things but if he is not going to cope I don’t want to put him in that situation again either – what would you do?
PS thanks for reading this far
Also – an easy one I hope – I just can’t figure out what LO stands for and it’s not in the list of acronyms – it seems to be related to peoples children ? something offspring?
So for some background – DS1 is 5yold – has been ‘explosive’ all his life – sensitive baby, colicky, reflux, undiagnosed dairy allergy – then compounded by being dealt with by us in a punitive way – time outs etc which didn’t work – and we are a ‘shouty’ explosive family. I have been working on gentle discipline for about a year now – converted by reading Alfie Kohn’s Unconditional Parenting (as an aside – very good for dismantling the old tools but not so good for putting new tools in place) – I am now fully committed to gentle discipline in principle – I just struggle at times – I would probably have been a ‘spirited’ child myself and had a very controlling domineering shouty mother – hence that is the pattern I fall back on – to my regret immediately afterward. I think also because of that I find it hard to put boundaries in place in a consistent respectful way….
Anyway DS1 has always particularly struggled at children’s birthday parties – more noticeably so from 3y onwards when there have been expectations of certain behaviour like playing certain party games and when things don’t go exactly as he imagines or expects they will.
The ‘general’ level tantrums have decreased enormously in the last 6 months – which I had attributed to our change in parenting and him getting to have his say a whole lot more – and we had even had a few kids parties that had gone well…
And in between times he is a delightful sweet child who deals with one on one situations very well.
But then we had this one… His best mate who he hasn’t seen for a while (we shifted away from that part of town) was having his 6th birthday party. I couldn’t go and Dad was out of town so got a friend to take him (thinking it would all be OK). Now she has a very ‘direct’ style but I thought that might be OK (in the end it wasn’t). He came home with her saying it had been a nightmare and that when he didn’t get to play exclusively with his mate or get always to go to the front of the line for the game he would burst into tears and have a tantrum – as well as a whole lot of other behaviour that was unacceptable to her – not playing inclusively with the other kids (sounds like he only knew one or two of them), speaking rudely to her etc.
Now I do realize that I should have spoken through it more with him – talked about expectations of how the party would go etc – he gets very excited before these things and that makes it harder – he also (I think) had built up the expectation that he would get to play with his friend quietly by himself and was not happy to have to play physical games with others. But I feel I couldn’t have just said no he couldn’t go to the party as he was so attached to going. I also wish I had spoken to my friend about our strategies for dealing with his tantrums – I just didn’t think of it because it had been such a long time.
I am concerned because as he is getting older there is a growing expectation that kids be dropped off and left by parents at these things but if he is not going to cope I don’t want to put him in that situation again either – what would you do?
PS thanks for reading this far
) the food dye thing. There certainly may be other factors, but this is one to look out for IMO. My almost 3 yo son (who eats almost exclusively healthy homemade food) had his first store bought cake this summer at a relative's b-day party. I thought it was important that he took part since food and community are so related... (even though I HATED the idea of him eating that!) The cake had green frosting on it. That night, my son who has never fallen asleep later than 8:30 was wired! I spent hours in bed with him trying to settle him to sleep. I think he finally went down around 10:30. He has no food allergies that I know of... I'm convinced it was the food dye in the frosting.
