My 3y3mo has suddenly started being quite challenging and I’m at a loss at how I should be approaching this sort of behaviour.
He’s been a delight really for as long as I can remember and we had no ‘terrible twos’ or anything similar, so I’ve never really had to be authoritative or challenge his behaviour.
An example is after 7 months of being fully potty trained he’s now weeing (on purpose) everywhere but his potty when he’s at home. This evening he’s weed all over the kitchen floor and then in his playroom. Each time he runs past his potty and giggles as he’s doing so.
He will scream at me when I ask the most neutral questions, try to run away from me when we’re out, pour drinks on the floor and generally just seems to be quieter and in an extremely bad mood a lot of the time.
However out of nowhere he’ll just flip sometimes and just be his usual chatty happy smiley self for an hour and there seems to be no rhyme or reason to it.
So far he seems to only be like this when he’s with me or his dad, we’ve not had feedback from anyone other family members or nursery.
I’m trying to explain to him calmly why what he’s doing isn’t what we should be doing and I try to do relative consequences (eg he runs away, he goes in his pram), but I feel so out my depth and also worried and sad that my usual happy little boy is clearly going through something. Is this normal? What do I do?