Power Struggle

As I sit here on the couch, Elijah is sitting on the floor playing with his cars and ramps finally content playing by himself. We have just finished cleaning the entire room, because he decided to dump out every bucket of loose toys he could find. I’m talking cars, blocks, crayons...if there’s loose multiples of something; he dumped it onto the middle of the floor. I had told him to choose what he wanted to play with (which he chose cars) and that everything else had to be put away. He chose to ignore me, and proceeded to not put anything away but rather try and make a larger mess. After a few times-outs for not listening and talking back, him becoming frustrated and me being pushed to my limit, the room finally got cleaned. Now he’s playing with his cars independently and without slamming them against the laptop as I type, or trying to climb over me saying “whaa oo ooing Momma” (translation “what are you doing, Momma?”). With that said, I would consider the ending to our last 20 minutes of what seemed like hell, a success.

We have been struggling with this lately. It’s becoming a power struggle between us, and whoever holds out longest wins. This all started with the infamous room of toys. I was beginning to become aggravated with cleaning that room full of toys every night after watching him purposely dump them out onto the floor. I felt like if he’s old enough to deliberately dump the toys out, then he’s old enough to put them away. That, and I was beginning to notice that I would ask him to do simple things I know he can do, and he intentionally wouldn’t do them and actually started walking away from me. I began to crack down on discipline and started attempting to follow through more; which has resulted into escalated super tantrums, crying and lots whining.  

Is he too young at 2? Am I setting my expectations too high? I really don’t believe so, but I also am not sure. I do know that if I hold out the longest between us, and am adamant that he follow my rules, he usually ends up complying in the end. This just proves to me that a command like “clean up your cars” or “come here” is an expectation I can certainly have of him. Is it more work for me? Absolutely! It’s exhausting! I have to ask him several times to do one thing. I have to watch him like a hawk to make sure he doesn’t wonder away. I sometimes have to show by example what I’m asking of him. I have to take time to follow through with time outs, and most importantly I have to keep a level head. It’s a whole lot of work and not to mention a big chunk of extra time that he’s just soaking up.

Then there’s the question of disciplinary actions and what to use and what not to use and are they actually working? Time-outs at one point seemed to work well for us. Elijah sat there, genuinely looked upset that he was in trouble and would come out of time-out behaving much better. We even could threaten him with a time-out if he was beginning to behave badly. He would look at us with a sad face, droopy eyes looking down at the ground after we asked him if he wanted a time out and he’d mumble “no.” Now all of a sudden, we’re questioning the effectiveness of the time-out. He still sits there without trying to escape, but instead of looking upset he has a smile on his face. When you go back to him and explain why he was in time-out he interrupts and starts talking about something irrelevant, which obviously is him trying to distract us. If you threaten him with a time out, he now answers “yes” that he wants one. We’ve since changed the question from “do you want a time out?” to “You will get a time out if you do that again.” Either way, it just doesn’t seem like time-outs are much of a punishment to him anymore. He’s seems too young to understand the concept of taking away toys, but I have done that too, and he just moves on to something else.

The reality comes to our day to day. His attitude and tantrums haven’t gotten any better, if anything he’s testing us more and as far as he possibly can; which some days feels like he has more stamina then me. I feel like Joel and I are the blind leading the blind. We have no idea if we’re doing the right thing, we have no idea how he’ll turn out when he’s older, and we have no idea if the techniques we’re using are actually teaching him something. Often times Elijah’s 2 minute time-outs are pow-wow times for Joel and I, as we look at each other blankly and as we justify to each other that we’re doing the right thing; our Pow-wows ultimately end up in a big huge question mark.

The combination of frustration and lack of confidence is really what’s weighing us down. I suppose what we have to do is chose our disciplinary methods, stick to them like glue, be as close to 100% consistent as we can and pray that in the end Elijah turns out to be a well behaved kid. *Sigh*