took one hour to get my 4 year old to sit on naughty step

[united4ever]

Is,there something i was doing wrong here?

started when my 1 year old was lying on the carpet and he started jumping over her head. I said its dangerous and not to do it. He continued so i said if you do it again you go on the naughty step. So he does it again.

then sat him down on the step and said that i told him not to jump over his sisters head because its dangerous. You did it again so now you can wait here for four minutes. As soo as i leave the room he's up so i keep going back in to sit him down. No tears yet, he thinks its a game and i am keeping a calm face/ tone.

this goes on and on until he's jumping all over the bed and laughing and thinking its a game of chase, i show no emotion and just put him back. Eventually he starts trying to fight/hit me when i put him back. After,an hour there were a few tears, he did 4 minutes and at the end i looked him in the eye, explained why i did it, told him to say sorry and we had a hug.

we haven't used the naughty step for a few weeks. Usually use it when he hits someone and it might take ten minutes (sometimes less) was this the wrong punishment? Or badly carried out. We have had some success with it before.

I don't think I EVER got DD1 to sit on the naughty step. She simply would not stay on it. Not even for a second so she was getting even more of my negative attention

She's strong willed to this day, now 13! Help!

Luckily for me she has a conscience and always responded better to a calm voiced "Well I'm very disappointed.." or "..I want you to have a think about what you've done..." type route.

I think that makes me a very bad person!

I've just remembered that at that age, DS1 was really jealous of ds2. I taught him to come to me and say "I'm feeling jealous of ds2, I need attention".

It took a while for it to stick, but I can tell you things ran so much more smoothly when he came to me and said that rather than bugging his wee brother.

Meglet - when you have an adopted child you have to be somewhat more creative with discipline. Punishment models need to be carefully used as the child has been punished in the harshest way possible in the past by losing their birth family/a caring adult without actually having done anything wrong, so the idea that if you are "good" then bad things don't happen doesn't really fit in with their knowledge of how the world really works.

I made up "time in" by using a "punishment" which gave attention in the best way and promoted togetherness and attachment at a time that the child might be programmed to expect you to walk away/get cross etc. I subsequently discovered that its a fairly well used technique by adopters so I wasn't as clever as I though!

That's interesting Kewcumber. I knew that things like separation and physical punishments are not advised for adopted children for obvious reasons but I'd never thought of the "preventing bad things from happening" aspect.

thats only my theory Bertie - DS was certainly too scared of separation for it to be a humane discipline method even if it had worked. But instinctively it just seemed wrong to me to punish a child for not being good enough when they have already been punished more than most despite being perfectly good enough. What on earth are you going to threaten them with after that!

Natural consequences work better for us - if you can't act in a calmer way then we will have to leave because you are scaring the other children,
which I guess some people would see as a punishment.

Hitting was a problem for DS for a while - a repeated "we don't hit people in our family" and removing him (or the baby in this case) worked. He didn't have the attention span to be understanding an hour later what had started the problem at 4.

I would 1) use the naughty step
2) If he gets off the step put him in timeout instead for longer. Use a boring room with no toys. Only let him out when he is behaving properly.

It sounds to me like he got a lot of attention for his naughtiness. Hitting you while being disciplined is not acceptable.

But also there are other techniques - distraction, removing DD, playing with the kids.

Time out is more like a cool down. It works with my son when he feels highly strung and you can't rationalise with him. Once he's calmer after time out, it's easier to talk things through. I've tried different techniques including holding but they didn't work.

Kew I just see that as setting a boundary, I agree though it's all semantics, I don't know that it matters what you call it as long as it's appropriate to the child's needs/age/understanding and it works :)