Immaturity

[charliegirl]

You do need to teach him appropriate behavior or he won't change. Obviously expecting him to act his age won't work but you can work at teaching him just as you would a 3 or 4 yr old.

Does anyone remember what worked for their kids? Its been so long since my son was that young that I don't remember.

[bugsmom]

KK...I so understand about the maturity issue. I always have to remember that Josh is about 2 years behind his peers in maturity and that helps me most days.

Anyway, I agree with CG...you have to make Sean aware of his behavior. I remember thinking at Seans age that Josh was never going to improve, but he has come a long way.

One of the things that I used to do with Josh is have a special code word that would cue him into making him aware that the behavior that he was displaying at the time was inappropriate. Instead of constantly saying Stop that, or No, I would let him pick a silly word and that would be "Our" word for a short period of time. For example, he picked the word "pickle" one time. If we were at a playdate or in a peer group situation and he was getting out of hand, I would just say "pickle" and he knew exactly what that word represented. It meant settle down and act appropriate. The best part was that none of the other kids knew what we were talking about and he didn't feel like a failure. In fact his friends would be like ?? and Josh and I would just smile and say we had a secret. I would always let him change the word when he got tired of hearing it and he felt involved. It worked great for us at that age, but I was mostly dealing with very Hyper behavior. I don't know if it would with Sean, but you never know.

[charliegirl]

One thing I remember that I always did with my kids when they were younger was to tell them I wanted everyone to see what a great kid I had so I needed them to be on their best behavior and make me proud, so everyone would wish their kid was a great as mine. Sometimes I would have to spell out that running or yelling or whatever wasn't allowed but it was amazing how often they really gave it their best shot.

That only really worked when we were going places where we wouldn't be a long time or they wouldn't be able to keep it up but they were so happy when I could tell them how proud I was because they were so good and how impressed people were with them, etc. I really made a big deal of it.

If we were longer than expected or I could see it was hard for them, I would put my arm around them and tell them how proud I was that they were being so good. That seemed to give them a little extra determination to keep being good.