Nowadays Aisyah whines whenever she can't get things her way. When I don't understand what is going on and try to distract her, she starts to channel her anger somewhere else like swiping a piles of books off the table.
Just yesterday we let her to paint for the first time. For some reason she hasn’t quite figured out that you put the paint brush in the water then into the paint I've extracted onto a plastic plate and then on the paper. She likes to dip the brush in the paint container and then put it dircetly onto the paper. The paint is finished quickly this way and there is no changing her mind about it. In my attempt to show her the correct method, she bent the paintbrush in anger and now it's shaped like a boomerang.
I remember reading that scolding is necessary for the sake of discipline and not out of anger but I can't
tahan sometimes. I've been using the timeout method consistently and it does seem to help a lot. I tell Aisyah I'm going to count to 5 and if she don't calm down by then, I will just leave her alone.
If that fails, I will walk away from the scene to prevent myself from screaming back at her. She knows that I am angry with her because she would come to me with her little sweet voice and say "Ibu, happy? Hug...Kiss" and she would hug me and offer her cheek for me to kiss after that.
I know the key is to not get too emotional, but she can make me go crazy and I don't want to spank her. Tell me I'm not the only one experiencing this on a daily basis because the kanda said he had never seen such a behaviour in any kid before (or maybe he hasn't seen enough kids...heh).
kak zee probably has the best method to solve this problem.
Most of America's populace thinks it improper to spank children. The other day I was talking to a fellow worker about methods used to discipline children. We talked about "time outs", grounding, holding back "rewards" until the child displayed desired behavior etc. One of the things we discussed was the act of spanking and my friend explained that no, he does not spank any of his children.
He explained that what he does is to take the misbehaving child out for a ride in the car and talk. He said that usually this works and that the child calms down fairly quickly and really doesn't take too much time.
By removing the child, in this case his son, from the immediate situation and providing a change of scenery, the child is allowed to focus on something different. Once the child has the opportunity to change perspective, things get better quickly and the child has better understanding of his place within the family and begins to understand the families’ concept of acceptable behavior.
He kindly shared a picture of the process which I share with you now.
