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Help with training a little one to be still and quiet when necessary…
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Okay ladies…I need some ideas/help for training my very BUSY, very ACTIVE, very TALKATIVE 2 year old how to be still and quiet when necessary – particularly in church, but there are other situations where she needs to do this too. She has SUCH a different personality than my older 2 kids that I am hard pressed to know where to begin with this one. It doesn’t help that we attend a very small church (around 40 people) and are the only family with a toddler. There is sometimes someone in the nursery during the sermon time (not during the first part of the service), but sometimes not. Lately she hasn’t even been able to make it through the first part of the service without having to be taken out. We’ve never let our kids bring any toys into the church service other than a pencil and tablet and she gets bored of that pretty quickly. I would prefer to deal with this in a gentle, positive manner rather than spanking for it. While nobody has been particularly mean or rude to us about it, I’m still fairly embarrassed by her behavior and frustrated at often having to miss out on large portions of the church service.
Thanks for any ideas,
Jen
I don’t have any great advice, but I will say snacks help our 2YO a lot. I don’t know how you feel about that though in church. Since ours allows adults to bring in their coffee cups (not even going there as I just can’t do that, but if you do, no big deal), but I share that to say she saw adults with refreshments so I didn’t feel too badly for allowing her a snack.
She knows she can’t have it until the preaching starts, and it usually keeps her quiet through that. If we do have to take her out, then she knows no snacks while out in the lobby area. And I also take our picture storybook Bible and that will sometimes hold her attention. She doesn’t care much for coloring yet either, though we do take tablets for her and a little container of crayons.
Hang in there and just be consistent. She’ll get the expectations sooner than later I think.
What do you do when you take her out? One thing I made sure of, is that being taken out is LESS enjoyable for my kids than sitting and colouring quietly. (I have allowed a pencil case full of crayons – but recently that has become a problem….)
So they have a choice of sitting quietly and colouring/listening in church on their own chair – or sitting in another room on my lap (or beside me if older) doing absolutely nothing (although usually having a tantrum on me at first…). We are fortunate that there is a room with the sound of the service piped in, so I can sort-of listen while I get the child calmed down….
Yes, definitely take away any allowed distractions like crayons if they have to go out. I do that too. The crayons and/or snacks are NOT available if I have to take her out.
Well I cannot wait to read more replies on this one! Jen, your description is almost exactly what we are going through (started when she was approaching 2 and she’s now almost 3). For a long time I had to take her out immediately. Now we are at the point where occasionally she’ll do 5 minutes before very LOUDLY saying, “Mama, I’m done!” but all in all the progress (if any) has been painfully slow. I have seen almost no improvement in my approach of being gentle and trying to distract her while still trying to listen and worship myself. At the first sign of outburst I take her to the back “church hall” and we walk the length, I’m trying to somehow listen and remain prayful, she’s looking at stuff (there’s a stash of crayons in a cupboard) or just wandering around. If there’s food out, she’s LOUDLY begging for whatever she sees on the fellowship table. She’s never really “engaged” in anything. Now, if I tried to make her sit, she’d be screaming and unfortunately the area is partitioned only by a folding wall (partly open), so the need to keep her quiet is still pretty high. Most importantly, I do get the sense that she knows she’s “got me” on this one. It only seems to be getting more the case as she’s approaching age 3. Frustrating! My older three boys were NOT this kind of 2-3 year old.
I see Suzukimom’s point about making the “experience” the child has upon being removed from Church somehow worse than the experience she would get while staying put. If that means you have to leave, I suppose you might consider this. I’ve done that on occasion, but I’m lucky because my Church has multiple services throughout the weekend and weekdays as well. The times I’ve known in my head that I was resigned to leaving, I actually felt more at peace — just had it in my head that the time I spend at Church with the family is actually “training-DD2-for-Church” …and my personal worship time is later. A couple of times I’ve left 9am service with her (by 9:12am!), brought her out to the van, had her sit it out unhappily for an hour. Then I go back to Church on my own for 11am service. I’ve been doing this only very recently, but it certainly feels better than my other situation where I felt so forced to do anything she wanted in order to keep her quiet.
Of course this doesn’t help you at all if you have only one worship service available, and I don’t know whether you’d consider even for a short time finding another way or place to worship? I just look back on my daughter’s year of age 2 to age 3, very similiar sounding to your daughter and I do see now that it was a year of:
“Oh, I’m at Church! Ok, so I now I just make lots of noise and I know Mama will do almost whatever I want!”
Just don’t want you to wind up in that place. That’s the one I’m now trying to get out of after a year of trying to be “gentle” about the whole thing.
Hope that helps a little, good luck!
Andi
I second (or third ?) making having to go out more unpleasant. Id just take her to the nursery or some other place and sit with her on my lap with no wiggling, toys, snacks etc. snacks and things during service help but can also become a crutch. I think the paper and pencils or crayons are a good way to go.
My other suggestion is to practice at home. We do family worship (bible reading, prayer, singing) after dinner most days. Doing it at home where correction is easier can help prepare them for in public.
Also wanted to say for my kids the church behavior seemed to click around age 2 and a half. Don’t give up! Kids need to worship too and you are doing a great thing by keeping them with you.
Nebby
I just heard a suggestion about this at church yesterday, from a lady who has raised several kids. What she said she did was make a little picture book to look at. She included pictures of the family, pictures of Jesus or other Bible stories her children knew. You could use one of those small photo books with pages to insert the pictures into and either switch the pictures, or just have a couple of books set up to rotate. She said it kept the children occupied longer than she expected at first.
Practicing at home helps too. I have a friend who said his mother made their daily ‘quiet’ time be at the same time of day as their Sunday Service would be. He was so used to sitting and looking at books or drawing during that time, that it was easy to do at church.
One thing I do is simply use church time as a cuddle time for my almost 3yo. I invite her onto my lap, stroke her hair, rub her back, whisper “I love you” in her ear, and quietly compliment her for sitting so still. That usually gets us a good 15 – 20 minutes of peace. I also bring a package of alphabet flash cards and let her look through them. I’ll ask her to find the Dog or whatever, and it takes a while to go through all the cards until she sees what she is looking for. Once she loses interest, my 5yo then uses the cards and puts them in alphabetical order.
This is a tough stage! I hope you get more ideas, because I can use them too!
Joanne
Well, everyone’s children will be different and we’ve had different struggles with some of our little ones than others. Right now our children are two girls age 11 and 6 and FIVE boys age 7, 4, 3, 1, and 7 months. We are majorly outnumbered by little ones so training them to be relatively quiet and still is essential. If one spouse takes out a little one the other is left with 6 children and it could get bad quickly without some training …LOL. Church is 3 hours long on Sunday, with the first 70 minutes with all members in one room on pews. There is no nursery available during this period of time. It is expected that we worship as families.
What has worked best for us:
No toys beyond something for the baby to chew on. Period. They’re just a distraction and something to fight over.
Plain paper and something to take notes/draw with.
Pretzels or some other dry, small snack. This is passed out halfway through Sacrament meeting (45 minutes into the meeting).
No leaving the room for bathroom breaks or drinks. You go before it begins or don’t go.
We try to sit behind a family that does not bring toys or electronics (seriously, a few families use Ipods/Ipads/Iphones to keep kids quiet during services – one family has them for all 4 kids up through the teen. They play games, text, and surf the web). These families are a distraction.
We expect our children to sit on our lap or the pew, not wander back and forth on the floor or lay under the pew, or stand on the pew. No laying either. With little ones we hold them or they sit beside an adult. We shush them quietly, redirecting their eyes to the speaker. During hymns we hand them a hymnal and help them follow along with a finger. If they get loud or upset and won’t quiet we take them out to a small classroom. We sit on a chair in the middle of the room without turning on the light, with the little one on our lap. (Bigger ones get their own chair). They may not get up, play, or do anything fun. When they are ready to be quiet we go back and sit with the family. Tantrums? Yep, we’ve been there, had those. Persevere and the child will recognize that coming out of the chapel is much less interesting (nothing to look at or do!) than sitting in the pew with the family.
Another thing that helps – we use sign language to correct and communicate the need for quiet to our children when we’re in a pew. This means I can look down the line of children and even though I can’t reach one of my middle ones (who are still little!) I can tell them what I expect.
Once you reach 3 or 4 years old depending on the child’s maturity we practice sitting quietly at home if they’ve had to be taken out during services at church that day.
Another round about way to help, we do family scripture study every day and it is done sitting and practicing being quiet if it is not your turn to read. We have actually done multiple practice sessions that are shorter in a day when we have a really little one needing this practice (age 1-2).
Hopefully those ideas and some from the others here give you some help!
Tristan, wow, I am amazed your little ones can go for 3 hours with no bathroom breaks? What do you do if one needs a diaper change??? Especially the smelly kind???
I have to admit I probably myself would need a bathroom break in a 3-hour time span. While our service is about 3.5 hours from start to finish, we spend half of that time in Sunday School and can take a bathroom break in-between the two. I agree though that getting up with so many at different times can be a big problem, so we go before worship and then in the break in-between as needed.
We have 6 children from 13 down to 2. BTW, on the electronics, YES! What is up with a whole family each having an iPad? I just can’t go there for my Bible, though I know many love it. I do have one on my iPhone, but I don’t use it at church or even in place of my Bible for study. It is just nice if I am not at home and need a word of encouragement on the road or something, but so many people now are using the iPad in our church. Just seems odd to me and the teens I see with them are often texting or writing notes on the notepad back and forth.
I didn’t explain that well, did I? We do bathroom break right before service begins and then again when it breaks to go to sunday school classes(70 minutes in, so sitting for just a few minutes over an hour). That class is 40 muinutes, then another break and kids can go potty at either or both breaks. We do diapers as needed (especially smelly ones!).
We also work with potty training children in that first two weeks or so by sitting right beside the door and slipping out with them if they need to go. We try to come to church a bit early those weeks to give them longer to sit on the potty before service begins as they are not so quick to do their business in the early potty training days. But once they’ve hit that fully daytime trained stage they are asked to use the bathroom before service or at break time.
Yes, Ipads. I just about fell over the week we ended up behind that family and my 3 year old Oliver said in his loud voice “Look mommy, he’s got Angry Birds”. Ahem. Everyone turned to look and it was a DAD, not even a kid. Honestly, if you’re not going to listen just go out in the hall to play a game. Sigh.
I do use my scripture app on an old ipod touch but only at church. It’s a lot lighter to carry with the diaper bag, baby, and toddler…LOL. I can’t do real, in depth scripture study on it because I just have to hold the book, turn pages, and be able to write notes.
Thanks ladies, for the encouragement. Last week when I took her out I just sat it the hallway with her and made her stay in my lap, there wasn’t any toys/playing, because just as you all were saying I don’t want to reinforce the lesson that if you behave badly in church you’ll just get to go out and play. And I’ve been hesitant to try books with her because while that might help her sit still, she wouldn’t necessarily be quiet since she likes to talk about everything she sees in the pictures! Haven’t tried snacks yet…I’ll have to give that one a think. It’s a little tricky to know what’s appropriate here because we are in France and there aren’t other families with very young children so I can’t just take cues from them. It was much easier where we were living when my older two children were this age…there were many families all in the same boat of working on training their kids to behave in church so there was a lot more sympathy there!
Thanks for the ideas, all. We’ll see how we go!
Jen
This is one of those hard ones. I have 3 little ones. 5, 2 and 1….all boys and I’m pregnant. My 5 year olds sits fine in church and has since he was about 3. My 2 year old still struggles, but last Sunday we made it through the service (Yay!). The baby obviously isn’t at the age where I’m expecting him to understand when it’s not appropriate to laugh out loud.
When things get loud, I usually take the two little ones together to the nursery and let them play. I go back and forth on whether or not I think that’s a good idea.
But one thing I don’t want is for church to be boring. I’ve seen kids who were expected to just sit still and quiet thatseem to zone out. (That’s what I would do if I had to listen for an hour to something I didn’t understand.) I don’t want them to develop that habit. So, I let them play (kids hear and learn while playing) until I’m sure they are cabable of sitting *and* listening/paying attention.
We have them listen for a special word during each speaker if they’re old enough to find it fun – it sometimes helps keep them interested. The word might be scripture, Jesus, love, charity – anything really. They can mark down how many times they hear it with a mark on paper.
Oh, I like that…. I’ll have to start that with the kids…. my problem is my attention tends to be pretty distracted working to keep them all quiet… so I’m not going to know how many times…
Tristan, thanks for the bathroom update LOL! I was amazed at their staying power! Admittedly, like I said, I’m not good with this myself, but we do similar to you it sounds like–take the breaks at natural points and yes, change smelly diapers if need be. Thankfully, she rarely goes while we are out. Funny how little ones get on a schedule and prefer to be at home too for their *business*.
And Tristan, yes, I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE that word idea. Genius! Thanks for sharing that. I plan to use that next Sunday!
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