Question
Hi There,
We have 6-year-old boy/girl twins and a nearly 2-year-old daughter. We've had so much trouble with our son for longer than we like to remember. He's incredibly defiant, obstinate, rude, and thereby disrespectful. Unsurprisingly, he struggled (behaviorally) throughout kindergarten this year (all-day program) so we've started the process of counseling, although we're not keen on the idea and think it's more bologna than anything. Both practices we went to insisted on an evaluation, which we did not want to do, but in the end, we relented at the 2nd practice. We have not yet completed the parent or teacher portions of the evaluation, so there is no official "diagnosis" yet (not that we have much faith in that anyways).
We've been reading John's columns in the local papers for years now, so we're familiar with his methods, but we're not fluent in them yet. We just started reading his book 'The Well-Behaved Child' this week, but we have some questions for our situation.
1. Should we start this journey with tickets, strikes, or kicked out of the garden for someone like our son?
2. Our twins share a room, so how do we handle it when they both need to be sent to their rooms? If they're both in there, they'll just play or plague each other. Our bedroom might work, but our youngest's crib is in that room for now and she still takes a nap in the middle of the day. Our son is rather destructive when he's put in their room, which is already stripped of everything, as we use one room for sleeping and the other for all the toys.
3. What do we do when he continually slams the door, kicks/hits the walls, and won't stay in the room. We generally ignore the slamming, banging, and extra-loud crying/whining, but he's constantly coming out of the bedroom. Going up there to correct him is just onerous and becomes a game, so what do we do?
Any help would be appreciated.
Thank you.
