The Joy's of Disciplining a 2 Year Old

Once Misses Jones hit 18 months old, things got really fun. Here little personality started to blossom right along with her vocabulary. "No!", became "No Way!". "Ya Yu", became "I Wuv You Mommy!" and "Binky?" turned into "Bink, Bink! Where Are You?"

But honestly, there is a very serious side to these little monsters and their coming of age. I can't speak for them all, but as for our daughter, she talks back, slows down when we say "Speed Up!", runs when we tell her to walk, doesn't want to hold our hand when we cross the street, hates for her teeth to be brushed and vehemently refuses to pick up things after we've told her more than a handful to times. Sometimes she wakes up in a very foul mood and does not want to put on her school clothes and insists that she goes in her pajamas. Other times we're fighting with her over not being able to have M&M's or marshmallows if she hasn't pottied yet or had anything of real sustenance to eat.

Mrs. Jones and I share the same opinions about what our ultimate goal is for disciplining our children. And for the most part we agree on how we administer discipline. We believe that our job is to lovingly guide our children to be obedient and do as much as possible to avoid doing anything out of anger. Yep, that's easier said than done, right? Let me go ahead and get this point out of the way. I am not against any method of discipline that aims to help your child be self-controlled, respectful and safe. Spanking, time-outs, revoking of valuable privileges, etc. Whatever gets YOUR child's attention without subjecting them to mental or physical abuse, I have no problem with.

The reality is that 2 year olds can push you to the limit. And sometimes my wife and I don't agree on how we handled a situation where Misses Jones wasn't on her best behavior. For instance, I don't have short temper, but sometimes I wonder if I've said "No" way too many times for my own good. I figure if I've said no more than twice and haven't gotten the results that I was expecting, then I'm pretty much just wasting my breath. If I tell Misses Jones, "Go ahead and pick up your toys in the livingroom before bedtime", and she's preoccupied with something else, what should I do? If I want to get results quickly, a quick swat on her bottom works.......if I pop her with enough velocity where she can actually feel it. Or I could send her to her time out spot shown in the picture at the top of this post. But on the other hand, I might think to myself that that could take too long. She has 15 minutes to get to bed and she might like to go to here time out chair this time. Once she comes out of time out I still might have to repeat myself over and over to get her to pick up her toys.

Well one day this past week, without talking to my wife about it, I decided that this is it. No more letting Misses Jones get away with telling us no or that she was going to take her sweet little time to do the things that we were telling her to do. So all day long, I'd tell her 3 times to do something. If she hadn't done it by the third time, I was going to make sure to tap her little thighs. Well this didn't sit too well with the wife. So, after the day was over with, she brought it to my attention that she didn't too much like my new method. Some of this was also because we found out something some weeks before. Spanking (which usually happened no more than once a week) gave our daughter the impression that it was okay to hit. So we would be playing, and she'd think that it was okay to hit us.

Again, we firmly believe that there's more than one way to discipline and correct a child....Or at least we are still in the stages of figuring it out. So, we are buffing up our Time Out efforts to be more consistent. Yes, disciplining your children with time out require A LOT of patience and self-control on the parents part. And yes, it can take longer to get the immediate results that you are looking for, but it looks like it will pay off.

For instance, we ask her to do something. If we have to ask more than twice, then she goes to time out for 2 minutes. (We use the microwave timer) The timer only begins once she is sitting in her chair or on the floor. If she gets up to dance around or whine about being in time out, the time starts over. If we let her, she'll just roll around on the floor and find a way to make this time enjoyable. Time Out should not be enjoyable. Once the timer goes off, she has to immediately do what we asked her to do. If she doesn't, she has to go right back to time out for 2 more minutes. We've tried this over the last few days and it works. She HATES time outs. Sometimes, she forgets how much she hates it, but is quickly reminded when she has to go back.

The biggest sabotager of our efforts is a lack of consistency. So for now, it looks like Time Out's bring about enough pain for her than spanking does, so we'll keep on doing that. Now if she decides that she wants to test us beyond these limits or constantly does something that puts her life or someone else's life in danger, I'm more than open to putting the smack down, for lack of a better phrase. :o)

Mrs. Jones and I have faced some challenges in this area and we don't always agree, but with God's help and our obedience to Him to do the best that we can to model the behavior that we expect of our kids, we should be just fine.