Stuff that's working, mostly, right now.

Well, did I rail on about a Positive Discipline book a while back? Between that book and a lecture I watched, I was starting to get the idea that positive discipline meant never doing anything to change a child's behavior besides really, really embracing their feelings and sort of shifting your whole life around so that they never had any reason to be upset, ever.

I remember thinking, "So what the crap are you supposed to do when the kid won't leave the park and it's dinnertime and you're starving?" Given what I'd read and seen, my impression was that the authors would all wag their fingers at you and suggest that next time, you should go to the park earlier and pack a snack. Which has its own wisdom, sort of, but what about this time?

In fact, now that I'm reading "Positive Discipline A-Z," I'm finding that there are lots of suggestions that are more in line with what I'm comfortable with. For example, if you're in the park situation, it's totally okay to pick the kid up and throw her in the car. You just have to acknowledge their feelings. "I know you want to stay. That must make you feel pretty disappointed." In fact, the author pretty much says kids have to learn to deal with disappointment and frustration. It's your job to help them learn how, not to avoid it.

Anyway, they also have several suggestions for things like bedtime that, despite my initial thought that the books were all about giving in to kids, are really pretty strict in some ways. Like, kids (even her age) should have chores and responsibilities. They should suffer natural consequences for their actions, like helping to clean up the messes they make. And they suggest cutting down on the bedtime shenanigans -- no "one more story," no "I need something." You should have a short list of bedtime routines (for us it's potty, teeth-brushing, jammies, three stories, and a little rhyme and kisses), then if she gets out of bed, I carry her back to bed silently. I have a hard time with this, actually -- I really feel compelled to talk to her. (In fact, the books showed me that I really have a tendency to over-explain. 2-year-olds aren't logical creatures. Sometimes it's just "That is the way it's going to be. I know you feel sad.")

Anyway, I tried it rather skeptically at first, but it's been fantastic. Not that we don't still have occasional nights where she stays awake for an hour and calls me every five minutes, but they're rarer. Most of the time now, she just goes to sleep. And instead of negotiating over how many stories and songs there would be and staying up until 8:40, she's usually down by 8:05.

Another thing that helped, actually, was giving her a snack before bed. I've mentioned before that she is a big eater. In a fairly typical day, she'd eat a bowl of oatmeal here, some eggs and cheese and toast at Mom's, a snack mid-morning (and sometimes another), then a big lunch like pasta or polenta or soup (usually including seconds), sometimes a pre-nap snack, a snack before dinner, dinner (a pretty healthy portion usually), and then the bedtime snack (which was an especially big one tonight -- seaweed, a cereal bar, fruit snacks, and a glass of milk). She just burns so darned many calories all day that she gets hungry at night and wakes up.

The chores and clean-up have worked well, too. She wipes down the table every night, and usually if I ask her to clean up a spill, she does it readily. And I know it's important to her, because tonight she started to get distracted, and I said "Okay, well I guess I'll do your chore," and she jumped up to do it herself.

Anyway, none if it's a fix-all. She's two, after all. She's gonna be a temperamental creature. But it's been better here in a lot of ways. I'm not quite finished (ahem, I took a break to read fiction), but when I am I'm going to read another in the series. I admit it -- I was wrong.