Obedience at 14 months

It’s always close to a mommy’s heart when we discuss discipline. So thank you, ladies, for being extra careful in your posts on this subject. We want to keep this forum a kind and encouraging place where we can disagree but always in love and respect. It’s hard to communicate in words only, without any facial expressions or voice inflections to help convey the speaker’s intent. So I’m grateful for those who try to include that helpful information and go the extra mile (or sentence, in this case, I guess ) to try to avoid any miscommunication.

@Heather, you’re right that your son can understand what you are saying and what you want him to do. One thing that worked well for my children to help them learn self-control at that stage is that if they started to pitch a fit, I would calmly put them in their cribs in their rooms and say, “You do your fussing in here. When you’re done fussing, you may come back out.” Then I would stand outside the bedroom door in the hallway where I could hear them but they couldn’t see me. I listened closely for any “break in the action.” If there was any pause in the fussing, I would pop back in the room with a smile on my face and say, encouragingly, “Oh, good! You’re done fussing.” Now, usually that pause would be short-lived and they would start in again as soon as they saw me. They probably thought, “Oh good, I have an audience again.” So if the fussing started up again, I would get a sorrowful look on my face and say, “Oh, dear. I thought you were done fussing” and I would leave to go stand out of sight again. I was trying to (1) take away their audience, (2) teach them that they could control their fussing if they wanted to, and (3) reinforce any attempts at self-control. Just one idea.

@Sanveann: You asked

If you didn’t spank, how would you immediately reinforce?

It’s a great question, and I would be happy to share with you what I’ve told many moms with a similar question. If you want quicker obedience, just move the consequence up and apply it sooner—whatever your consequence might be. So, for example, if the consequence in your scenario is to physically help your child put away his toys, you could just move up that consequence and apply it right away instead of after you get to “3.” 

That reminds me of a funny story my mom used to tell about me. My mom used the count-to-3 method. (I don’t use it with my children, by the way.) Well, according to her, one day when I was little, a couple of close friends of my mom’s were watching me in the store while my mom tried on some clothes or something. I was darting in and out of the circular clothing racks, and my mom’s friend told me to stop. I darted into the middle of one of the racks and waited. My mom’s friend counted, “1, 2, . . . . . . . 3.” I still waited. The other friend said, “What happens now?” My mom’s friend said, “I don’t know. Her mother never gets to 3.”