You are a wonderful and trully blessed gift to a lot of parents out there and I am one of them. Thank you for writing my thoughts exactly and reading my mind so many times! You’ve changed my parenting and my family’s state to better so many times without even knowing it!
And after all that, I must say I’m finally brave enough to write here because this is exactly our situation in the present. Except my sun is almost 4 and he is doing this every single minute of every single day and both myself and my husband are exhausted.
I think one big cause is my mother in law, living with us, too. She will not hold any limit with him, and they spend a lot of time together while we are at work. But he does this with all of us and with every single subject.
I also noticed my sun’s behavior gets worse the manier we are. If it’s only one of us with him, he has a fairly good behaviour. The second one us the other 2 adults in the house comes home, behaviour gets worse. And when all 3 of us are with him, he usually just gets out pf control.
HELP! We are desperate and we don’t know how to truly evaluate and help in this situation.

Hi June, that sounds just fine to me.

I would like to know. Thank you:)

thank you so much for all those wonderful articles! Reading them helps me through the tough times and makes me feel good in the good times!!

Today, I feel like I’m in desperate need of help though!

Our daughter (2y10m) is going through a very aggressive phase and by now we are at loss of how to handle this. She is screaming, hitting, biting, scratching and throwing things, taking her cloths off and melting down completely.

She was showing similar behavior when I was pregnant > gave birth > little brother (now 1.5y) started crawling and starting at her daycare center. She’s always been so good with her little brother and has shown so much love and affection towards him. Her aggression was always only directed towards me and at those times of changes she was leaning completely on her father (“Not mom, only dad” was what she was usually yelling).

Now she’s aggressive towards all of us. It’s like the minute she’s not getting what she wants, she’s falling apart and can’t snap out of it. It can go on and on for an hour and it really starting getting to us!

We understand it is part of her development and and my husband and I are trying to be respectful to her, her brother and to each other but OH MY it’s HARD these days!!!

My question is not about how to prevent it, but more about what we can do, when we missed the moment? What can we do to help her through her anger? To help her understand that we are there for her and love her, always and forever! Because being there and telling her does not seem to be enough! Whenever we do, she is just fighting us even harder.

Holding her makes everything worse, letting go of her too tough, because she is hitting and throwing things. I started putting her in her little brother’s baby bed, telling her, this is her safe space, where she can kick and hit the pillows, but she’s so big by now, it is easy for her to climb out.

I’m trying to put the “parent-hat” on and rationalize that I am 37 and she’s a tiny 2.5 year old but what I feel is powerlessness, helplessness and failure! It’s very hard for me to NOT take it personally. But believe me, I’m trying!

Yesterday she threw a CD case against my eye, managed to kick me in the face and in those moments I started losing it too! I’m pushing her away from me, yell and leave the room because I just can’t take it anymore. I feel like I just got one too many bite marks, scratches, bruises from my baby girl who I actually love to pieces. Where does all that anger come from?

I have done a lot of soul-searching: I have not been the best at setting boundaries. In hindsight I know that and I think I also know where it comes from: I’ve felt terrible about not being able to give her a hundred percent when I was pregnant with her baby brother and after he was born. She was not even 15 months old. She needed me as much as he did and I couldn’t give it all to her. I understood that she leaned so much on her father but it also hurt! A LOT! Maybe therefore I was softer, comforting more than needed, giving her more attention in moments where it would have been wiser to take a step back. I thought I was practicing RIE but I fell into the trap, because I was not clear and instead of setting boundaries, I was avoiding conflicts because I didn’t want to feel more rejection! And now it backfires!

Maybe one more thing: As of recent events, she started kindergarten 2.5 months ago. She started a little earlier than usual, because we felt that she is the happiest, when she is outside all day and were told that she is absolutely ready by the pedagogues in her old day care. She is fully potty trained and has very good speaking skills, in both Danish and German. It’s a wonderful forest kindergarten – we live in Denmark – with great pedagogues and where we know that she is very happy, once she is there. But getting her to go is a power struggle EVERY MORNING!

I would be so thankful for your insight and help!! Thanks in advance! Your comment will be highly appreciated!!!

I hear you! My daughter is the same, only she is 7 years old. All the tips I read here work great on my son (who is a typical child) but they don’t work on my daughter. I need help with her!