my older daughter's about the same age. she used to be an angel, but in the
past few month she has been a handful to deal with at times. on one hand,
given my wife has to spend more time with our 2nd child, i am happy to be
spending the majority of the time with her and she’s finally a daddy's girl
; on the other hand, i now appreciate why they call it the terrible two!
here's my 2 cents:
1) it's all about options: when she resists, there's a number of things you
can do: you can threaten her (time out), you can reason with her, you can
propose alternative options (let's play with that instead), or you can use
distraction (hey look a bird)
2) how you communicate matters: if one way of messaging doesn't work, try
another approach - but repeating the same thing over and over rarely works.
3)"凶" may be an effective fix and works in the short run, but in the longer
run it gets less and less effective each time you use it to a point either
your child is scared of you, or it becomes completely useless. It's like
using antibiotics - doctors don't prescribe them freely b/c eventually the
germs will build up resistance. This is one of the reasons why i try not to
raise my voice often, if at all. My sister inlaw yells at her kids all the
time and even she knows she's just a "paper tiger" in her kids' eyes.
4) logic and reason may take longer - but even i was shocked how well it
worked at times. for example, my daughter watches a bed time educational
video w/ me every night. it's been her bed time routine since she was 6
month old. lately she would randomly request change to another video
midstream. at first i complied, but it kept getting worse and worse so one
day i told her we are going to watch this today b/c you requested it, and if
you want to watch a different one, let's watch it tomorrow, ok? to my
surprise she actually said yes.
5) it's also important to give her a grace period - so before play time is
over, tell her ahead of time that we will play for one more minute (even
though I don't think she fully grasps the concept of minute yet) and then it
's time for bed.
6) try to make it simple (or not confusing): there are times when i realized
i need to make it simple in my rules or explanations. we used to find it
funny and ask her to ask her to “chui2 bei4” but I soon realized it’s
hard for her to distinguish b/w “message” and “hitting”. Furthermore,
she doesn’t understand where she hits matters (face vs. the back) yet. So
i asked her to stop "hitting" all together, for now.