She is adorable, she is cute, she gives great hugs, she loves her family immensely and she is t-r-o-u-b-l-e! Buggy is great, she really is, but I think she is the one that I am going to have to watch out for. She's at a stage where she thinks running away when you call her is funny. When you give her a direction she does the opposite. She purposely antagonizes her brother, whom she adores. The list goes on!
Buggy truly adores her big brother. She wants to do everything he is doing. She wants to do all the big kid stuff that she is not ready to do. When he is playing by himself quietly, she'll antagonize him so that he'll pay attention to her. When we go somewhere, she calls Boogie to make sure that he knows that we're leaving and sometimes she'll even go up to him and tug his hand to make sure he's coming along.
Last night takes the cake. Boogie was given a time out. Time outs work for him. He cries, he's remorseful, he apologizes. When told to go to time out, Boogie has learned over time to just go. At this point I can just point to the steps and he'll go there crying (fortunately he is rarely deserving of a time-out). Buggy saw this and immediately hit me on the leg. I told her to stop and then ignored her. She hit me three more times and much harder. Ummmm, did you want my attention? Why yes she did. She wanted a time out too, to show solidarity. We used our stern voice, told her we do not hit mommy and that she would be given a time-out. She giggled, she hit me three more times and ran to time-out. That's right, she wanted to sit next to Boogie on the steps. Hmmmmmm, this doesn't look like it's working.
She was given another time-out location and we are starting the same process with her that we did with Boogs 3 years ago. Firm, consistency, stern voice. We also temper this having her apologizing, us providing forgiveness, and guiding her to proper actions.
However, I don't think it's going to work for her. She thinks it's funny, she wants to be with her big brother, and consequences don't seem to work for her. Solidarity, sister. ugh!
yeah, my kids try that too. both of them will want to go into time out once they see the other go. so for us, "on purpose" time outs are worse than first time outs. They are in a separate location and out of everyone's eyeshot. every now and then they forget and try to get solidarity time outs and we are swift to remind them!
ReplyDeletecontinue to be very firm and she'll learn it is not cool to do something bad just bc a big kid does it!