How do you deal with rudeness from a 4yo?

Use as few words as possible Get down on her level, touch her and talk. it is a stage and will pass. If you feel too angry tell her you need to take a break and resume in 5 minutes.

I have made very similar posts about my 4.5 year old. Today we were at the mall, and DD was holding DS's hand. (She's 4, he just turned 2). He said something she didn't like and she started jerking his arm, pretty hard. I picked him up, walked to the car (we were in the parking lot) buckled them in, and then tried to talk to DD about it.

She put her fingers in her ears and would not listen to a thing I said. I said, "if you can't take your fingers out of your ears, you are going to have to go right to your room when we get home." She ignored me.

And then she screamed the whole way home about how she didn't want to go to her room. I told her "if you are going to hurt people with your hands and your actions, you may not be around us. We don't like to be hurt." She was mad, but she went to her room.

After about 10 minutes I went to get her and she was AWESOME for the rest of the afternoon.

I am a time-out convert.

I tried to do all logical consequences, but for rudeness, she doesn't care about the consequence, because it is the goal. If she is rude to me and offends me, then the consequence is that I get mad. And half the time that is the whole point.

She also doesn't understand how dangerous it can be to pull a young child's arm so hard (I was worried about nurse-maid's elbow). And besides, she was *trying* to hurt him.

Anyway. Don't mean to take over your thread, and maybe a time-out wouldn't work for your kiddo, but it worked great for me. She played in her room, I didn't make her sit with her face to the corner or anything, got control of herself, learned that if you're rude and hurt people, you may not be around them.

"That sounded rude. Please say it politely." "I hear that you really don't want to stop what you're doing and get ready to go. Your voice is sounding rude. Please take a deep breath and try again."

As a child, I was often told I was rude/sassy when I was, in fact, just feeling very strongly about this. I have very distinct memories of having my very valid (in my eyes) points ignored because of my tone of voice. As a result, I separate out content from tone as much as possible. Sometimes my kids can't fix the tone until I've acknowledged their feelings. Sometimes they just aren't monitoring their tone.

4-5 year olds, developmentally, are learning the power of words. As a result, they overuse that 'power' a lot. This is the age of threats and wild declarations, such as "you can't come to my birthday party ever again!" Things like tone are very hard to control, especially if you're feeling emotional (which apparently 5 year olds do all the time).

So, if I had to summarize my tome into a sentence it would be: Acknowledge the meaning, then work on the tone.

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Great advice which I will try to remember and live by!