Taming Tiny Tyrants: What to Do if Your Preschooler is Constantly Ordering You Around

By: Karen Alonge (View Profile)

When she identifies the stressor, help her find a solution that reduces the over-stimulation. Maybe some quiet time, a snack, a hat, or some headphones will help. Consequences in situations like these miss the point. She needs your assistance generating alternative solutions to her problems. Take care of the problem that triggered the behavior, and the behavior goes away by itself. 

When she gets critical about your egg cooking technique, she might be comparing an inner map of how it “should” be done with what she is seeing you do, and trying to reconcile the two. She sounds very bright, and would therefore be quite sensitive to discrepancy. Developmentally, she’s probably also very eager to identify the “right” way to do things.

It might be an interesting experiment, when and if you feel like it, to go along with it and invite her to help you. Which might sound like this: “Sounds like you have an idea about how eggs should be cooked, and it’s different from what you are seeing me do right now. Tell me more about your idea!”

Talking to her like this is helping her to learn and internalize the language to use when she wants to talk about a discrepancy in the future. (And it may take a while before you see evidence of this, but it IS sinking in! Kids understand concepts long before they can articulate them.)

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posted: 12.06.2007
Karen Alonge
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