After about 10 minutes, my husband came in and said, ‘how do you know you’re not hurting them or making things worse?’ I had to shout over their wailing that we were on the right track and even predicted that, at the end of all this, one sister would genuinely give the toy to the other.
As soon as another child would begin playing with a toy, he would come over and either hit the child or grab the toy away.
Desperate, one day, to get my active and resistant 3-year-old dressed, I came up with this game.
Immediately after that, he said his first sentence!
Whatever I said, the answer was “NO!” He was really out of kilter.
“You know, my son is driving me absolutely crazy. He whines and whines and I just go up the wall. Sometimes I have to leave the room, ’cause I don’t want to hurt him and I’m going nuts. I just leave him alone when he does that.”
Our older son tore it out of his brother’s hands and said that he was playing with it.
She had thought if her little girl was angry, that she was being ungrateful or inconsiderate or something like that.
When one reasonable request doesn’t get through to our children, it’s time for an entirely new tactic. We propose the vigorous snuggle!
She kept forcefully resisting me when I would try to get her lie her down on her changing pad.
My impression was that Joey was in need of having a huge cry to release his pent up feelings, but he couldn’t get to tears very easily since her was conditioned to repress them at home.
Before I learned about the Hand in Hand approach, I either forced them to take a bath, doing it as quickly as possible, or I avoided giving them a bath at all.
…it even helped me, too, dispel the unpleasant memory of standing by powerlessly while she cried for me to help her.