I am really proud

[susia]

2 years ago I had a really aggressive badly behaved 3 year old. He pushed, hit and fought with other children. At 2 he was even worse, he even hit babies.

At 5 he is lovely. His behaviour is fantastic. He is polite and great company. We laugh at the same jokes. He very rarely gets upset, has very, very rare tantrums and can be reasoned with about almost everything.

I'm not trying to boast, just saying it gets better. 2 years ago I was at my wits end.

Thank you! I have a two year old, it's truly wonderful to hear that they grow out of the little shit challenging stage!

Mine is 4 going on 13.

What is your secret

they do definately. I do have the odd incident - he definately prefers boys to girls and can be a bit mean to girls but 99% of the time he is lovely.

Today he was watching tv and the presenter was talking about a lion saying 'and this is olive'. He thought he said 'and this is AN olive'. He laughed about it for ages, saying 'doesn't he know what an olive is???' it made me laugh as well. Sounds stupid now.

But he is even considerate like when he wanted to go to soft play at the weekend and I said I'd rather take him swimming as soft play is a bit boring for me and he said ok, swimming is fine.

I don't have a secret. 2 years ago I was getting offended and worried about my parenting skills, someone suggested I watch Supernanny and everyone thought he was a 'handful'. I felt like a really bad parent. He used to do things like throw his shoe across a restaurant table, he even stripped at preschool just when they were showing prospective new parents around!!

susia - i really agree a lot of stuff just gets better on its own! even though you think for a while it never, ever will. i try to think of things to suggest sometimes to people going through what i did at the 3,4,5 yr stage and then i realise that, actually, mostly what changed has been down to the passing of time, rather than any 'secret' amazing parenting skills! i still struggle with some aspects of my two's behaviour (they are now 7 and 5) but my god when i look back at what our family went through a few years ago in terms of strops, bad behaviour, tantrums etc, when i was at my wits' end and virtually sleepless with anxiety over it all, we are in such a different place now, so much happier and more settled and i can be proud of mine too - definitely not all the time but a lot of it . on sunday my DD (my nemesis much of the last few years in terms of contrariness, wilfullness and tricky-temperament-ness!) said to me that she felt really lucky to have me as a mummy bcs i was always smiley, fun and Not Serious. (little does she know what goes on inside, eh?!) i almost fell off my chair. a spontaneous compliment from DD (okay it took 7 years but i'll take it, i'll take it!)! so yes IT GETS BETTER!