Am I being cruel??

[Conniedeps]

I have a 2.5 yr old dd, she's a typical toddler, has tantrums and is often defiant. I'm a single mum and Co-sleep with her, but she has her own room with a cot in it. I try my best (and usually succeed) at being calm with her when she has meltdowns and when she's calm, explaining to her why she couldn't have/do whatever it was she wanted. I try to avoid things like timeouts & naughty step but when she's deliberately defiant eg. she'll spit on the floor and I'll tell her firmly no, we don't spit, it's not nice and she just smiles and does it again it drives me mad (as I'm sure it does every parent!) so I've started saying if you do it again you're going to your cot. Obviously she does it again so I take her kicking and screaming to her cot, put her in there (she can't climb out) shut the door and leave her crying for a few minutes. Then I go back in and ask her "why did you have to go to your cot?" She'll say "cos I spat on the floor" or whatever it was, I'll say "you had to go in cos I asked you not to and you didn't listen to mummy. Are you going to spit on the floor again if I take you out?" She says no, I take her out and all is fine again (till the next time she does something similar).

We were talking about emotions the other day and I asked her when she felt sad and she said "when I go to my cot". I know that's probably pretty obvious but it made me feel awful and so guilty. Am I being cruel by doing this? As I said I always thought I was against a naughty step but what I'm doing is actually worse I think! Would it be better to try a naughty step? (I really don't think she'd stay somewhere she wasn't contained). What are some gentle parenting techniques people use for toddlers who don't listen and won't stop doing what they're told not to that actually work? Thanks for any advice :)

It sounds to me like she might be spitting to get a reaction from you – often any reaction is interesting to them at this age, and they are experimenting with their ability to affect the world (and people) around them. Don't feed that desire for a reaction. You could potentially ignore it completely, just wipe up the spit with no comment, and go on with your day. If you need to say something, have a stock phrase like 'no thank you, DD, no spitting', same thing every time, and sound as bored as possible. (my eldest's version of this was running away from the table before her hands and face were clean, so obviously we did need to go get her and clean her up.) It does work, although can take a fair bit of repetition.

Other things, it depends what it is. Something like refusing to get dressed, if it's a nursery day (i.e., I need to get to work), either she's getting dressed now or I'm taking her in her pyjamas. (I've never actually had to take her in her pyjamas, but I would.) A non-nursery day, that's fine, she can let me know when she's ready to get dressed, but I'm not playing until she's ready for the day – I'll go and get on with other things. And we're certainly not going to the park until she's ready for the day. (The flip side of this is that if we don't need to go out at a set time, I would never ask her to get dressed when she's in the middle of something – I respect that she is busy colouring/building/whatever.)

Personally, I'd avoid using her bed as a 'naughty step' – you want positive associations with her sleeping space. If there are times when you need a sitting still type consequence (I've done it when she's not listened and done something unsafe and not wanted to talk about it afterwards – sit here near me and let me know when you're ready to talk), I'd keep her nearby. I'd try for a more directly linked consequence when you can, though.

I'm a granny, but when my kids were growing up, I never once used the bedroom/bed as a threat. The naughty chair was used (just an ordinary chair in the kitchen), but only for a couple of minutes, and only for something very naughty. Spitting isn't the worst thing, and I'd probably ignore that kind of behaviour - your little girl is probably doing that for attention. Praise her when she's good, ignore little things like that. Spend more time/attention on her when she's being nice.

Thank you for your replies :) @skkyelark yes my LO often refuses to get dressed in the mornings too and often I find myself using the cot to speed things along cos 2 mins in there and she gets dressed. But like you I only push it if we have to be somewhere, if she refuses and we’re not in a hurry I wait until she’s ready but I don’t let her go downstairs until she’s dressed. When you say “she’s getting dressed now or I’m taking her in her PJs” what do you do to get her to get dressed quickly? I think if I said that to my dd she’d be delighted to go in her PJs!

So if it reached that, it would actually be the end of a rather long process. (DD1's 4 now, and there's much less rigmarole, although still some, depending on the day. Other days I can ask her to go get dressed and get back a suitably dressed child.)

We eat breakfast in pyjamas, so I'd start by saying it's time to go upstairs to get dressed. If she refused, I'd give her a choice of two ways to go up the stairs (walk, crawl, slither, be carried, whatever I think might tempt her in that moment). If that doesn't work, I say I'm going to count to 3, and then I'm going to choose for her. If I get that far, I choose 'be carried', and I'll do it. Similar pattern for the process of actually getting dressed, this shirt or that shirt, and so on, although I might mix in a little bit of random silliness as well, pretending her trousers go on her head or that I've found a frog in her sock, or whatever. It's difficult to be defiant when you're laughing. (This extends to physically defiant, if they're laughing, they're generally too distracted to put up much resistance to you popping a shirt over their head, etc.)

It feels like an awful lot of talking for a basic task, but if you keep it going at a decent pace (don't give a million chances, this or that, 1-2-3, I choose), it doesn't actually take that long – probably less than what you're doing now, although I guess maybe you get something else done whilst she's in her cot.

If, however, she really isn't cooperating one day, and you do reach the point of needing to say 'right, come get dressed now, or you're going to nursery in your pyjamas', she might well initially be delighted. But you still achieve a number of things – you get to work on time, for one, and she sees that you can handle this. She threw peak resistance at you, and you shrugged and took her in her pyjamas. If you have a good nursery or childminder, I think they'll then back you up (and will have seen it all before), something like a little gentle disapproval that wasn't that silly not to get dressed with Mummy, now she has to go get dressed instead of getting stuck into whatever tempting activity is set up. And at the end of the day, pyjamas are not actually very different from a t-shirt and leggings.