We seem to have very little luck with any kind of discipline. It's so frustrating. DS does listen a little better to my demands than to DH, because I do lay down the law. I find it extremely difficult to find the line between reasonable consequences and unreasonable ones. Especially when DS is doing something dangerous. You have to stop a kid from running into parking lots, for example, but what if they're struggling and trying to escape?
We're not in parking lots often, but we were a lot this weekend. I found myself spending a lot of time planning, as we walked through the garage, how to grab him if he took off at any given moment, because one of the times I grabbed his arm in a way that I know could dislocate his elbow (it happened once, in a similar situation, a year and a half ago), and I was terrified of grabbing him wrong again. It seemed like a lot of my time spent over a tantrum that hadn't even happened yet. He's also banged his head a lot of times, struggling to get away from me when something serious was going on. Once, we almost got caught in a subway door.
This stuff terrifies me.
The best approach seems to be to make sure he's getting what he needs in a day, but that can be nearly impossible, because some days he seems to need absolutely continuous, very focused attention, and gets frustrated if you so much as need to think before answering his questions.
Edited to add: There's no way in the universe that monetary/similar consequences would bother him. There are only two things per day that DS cares enough about to buy his compliance. Two. that's not a lot of currency.
Last edited by Michaela; 12/04/12 11:34 AM.
