3yo guest behaving impeccably ... 3yo son being a monster - help!

[GoingPostal]

ds is 3.1 and loves his best friend who has come to play ... but is spending the morning sobbing, crying, wailing inconsolably every time things don't go his way.

I do know how hard it is to share - but am at the end of my tether about the constant crying. it seems to be ds's default reaction when things aren't to his liking.

When he cries it means a lot of the time people give him what he wants "to stop him crying" - whereas if he were screaming/ tantrumming I imagine they wouldn't. I don't give in to him and have several times this morning removed him to another part of the room and kept playing with his friend (feel awful though as he is just sobbing and sobbing).

Please tell me this will pass or let me know if you had the same and found a way to crack it. ds is very poor company right now and his friend is really not enjoying his time with us!

It will pass (although dd1 still does it now at the age of 6). I think the best thing you can do is remove him from the room, let him calm down, explain to him why he has been removed and then (when he's stopped crying) return him. Dd1 is always better when i'm not in the room (because she's not going to get a reaction from me), now she's a bit older i shove them out in the garden (i keep an eye through the window) and she plays fine until i come out and then its ''xxxx did this, and xxxx did that'.

I think it's quite hard for a toddler when they first start to have friends over.

Imagine if you invited a friend over and she started trying on all your shoes and then left them in a bid heap in the middle of the bathroom floor and looking in your kitchen cupboards and saying 'do you us these tinned tomatoes? I always buy Sainsbury's reduced salt ones' Then emptying your glasses cupboard and filling it full of DVD's because she thinks that would be a better arrangement. Then she takes all of the keys off your key-ring and arranges them in height order. Then she has a jump on your bed and then asks for a cup of coffee but not in that cup because she always has her tea in a cup with a picture of an apple.

That's what it is like.

They love going to other people's houses and playing with other people's more exciting toys, each one for four and a half seconds before moving on to the next because everything is so exciting compared to what they have at home. But it is much harder to have someone to your house playing with your toys.

thanks for the replies - LOL at how you describe it savoycabbage!

I do understand that it is very hard but the constant crying is so wearing and I find it increasingly hard to have sympathy for ds as he just can't calm down for long enough before starting up again!

I was a complete cry baby myself until I was about 10 so think I am probably over-keen to sort this out now.