My son has had so many difficulties with behavior in recent months. He has every single reason in the world to be angry and sad on top of all the regular difficult 4-year-old emotions, but his dad and I have unintentionally encouraged it; making excuses for his tantrums, by allowing him to be silent or even borderline-rude to doctors or nurses, and by allowing bad behavior to go without consequence. There is always a little voice in my head that I hate even more than the hopeful voice, and she says, "He might not get to live a long life... why not let him do what he wants?" It's harder to shut her up than the stupid voice of hope. But I cannot live my life as a parent on the assumption that the worse case scenario will be OUR scenario. I need to live as if he will grow to be a crotchety 99 year old man one day; hopefully one who is able to hear that he will not be getting two string cheeses for snack without stomping to his room and screaming, "No one likes me!"
So we are cracking down. It is hard and awful and miserable, and we suck at it. The other day we had planned for me to take him and his older sister to see a movie. The behavioral book says that if a negative behavior happens, to give a consequence without more explanation than, "No, you're not going to do ___ because I don't like the tantrum you threw earlier today." He was having a hard morning, and I had given him far more grace than I probably should have without any consequence beyond TV and video games taken away for the day, plus time in his room when he was freaking out. But shortly before it was time to get ready to go, he threw a granddaddy of fits; slamming the door so hard the doorknob fell off (our house is 78 years old, this is not unusual). My husband and I hunkered down for a meeting and decided that we should do the hard thing and not let him come to the movie. Both of us were heartbroken to think of having to follow through, especially while overhearing the kids talking about how excited they were to go after lunch. So we cheated.
We had another pow-wow before ever telling our son of any consequence and decided to let him choose whether he wanted to come to the movie but not get popcorn and pop when his sister did, or not come to the movie at all. Jealousy over drinks especially is a major problem for him, but even so, I did not expect him to choose not to come to the movie, which he did. Apparently (and I'm glad I missed this), when his sister and I had just walked out the door he started screaming, "No, Mommy, I changed my mind! I want to come! I want to come! Mommy, stop!" Ugh, I'm tearing up just imagining the pathetic scene. My husband, so rarely the bad guy, told him that his choice had been made and he had to take his nap.
Unfortunately for our tough-love lesson, the movie theatre lost power after only 6 minutes and my daughter and I didn't even get to see the movie. We finished our discounted pop and popcorn in the dark. My daughter, starved for attention as she is, was understandably very upset about it. To try and make it up to her, I found another kids' movie playing at a discount theatre and, on a whim, took both her and her brother to it, completely disregarding his previous choice to skip the movie.
So after a special event like going to a movie even though he had behaved poorly that day, he was grateful and delighted, right? No, he fussed throughout a large part of the movie because his sister had eaten popcorn 3 hours earlier. Then he yelled at me when we got home because it was time for dinner and he hadn't had a chance to do anything "special". What is wrong with 4 year old brains? I felt like I lost every battle at every corner that day.
Although the next day when I commented that he had been doing better with his temper, he said, "Next time, do you think I can get popcorn?" So maybe a little teeny bit of something sank in. A little.
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