Generally I've had an easy ride with my now 3.5 year old DS. Until now. He is still lovely but his challenging behaviour is definitely on the up and I already feel a bit out of my depth. I feel like I'm massively winging it and could really do with some advice.
We battle all day over the smallest things and I know I'm going wrong somewhere so some help would be really appreciated!
So far to manage poor behaviour I've used the naughty cushion. A warning followed by going on the naughty cushion for 2/3 minutes. A talk about what happened. A cuddle and an apology.
I also use a lot of consequences. So 'if you don't get dressed then you can't go in the garden' 'the Lego needs to go away before we can get the cars out' 'if you don't do a wee (first thing in the morning) then we can't go downstairs to have breakfast' 'if you splash the water everywhere in the bath, you will get straight out'.
For particular challenges we use stickers with an agreed prize. So at the moment we've been working on him getting himself dressed, ten stickers and he gets his prize. I had to introduce a timer with this because it was taking forever. All the whining and jumping around and throwing clothes everywhere.
He whines a lot. And argues a lot. He might ask me to unmix the play doh, I explain I can't. He says 'you can' accompanied with jumping up and down and crying and whining.
He will often completely ignore what I'm saying if it's not what he wants to hear. So will ask over and over for something I've already explained is a no. How do you manage this??
I'm sure this is all normal...but I'm just after ways to generally manage the backchatting, the whining, the crying and throwing himself around when things don't go his way.
For context, he has an 11mo brother. He goes to preschool 2 days a week. On other days we have a planned activity in the morning and the afternoon is generally free time. Anything else then please ask me!