Preschool children often confound us with their behavior. They’re playing and laughing one minute, and crying “for no reason” the next. We ask them not to poke their baby brother’s eyes, and they look right at us, with angelic faces, and do it anyway. What is going on? It can be a baffling, maddening process to try to answer that question! I’m going to be adding a series of posts, linked from here as well, in an effort to give you a few more tools for observing, understanding, and approaching child behaviors using the positive guidance philosophy and techniques. Here’s what you have to look forward to:
Tell me I’m not the only mother with a two year old who thinks the best thing to do with five boxes of puzzles is to put them all into one bucket together. Luckily for me, I learned at a university lab preschool, that it is very handy to number the backs of your puzzle pieces to help out in just such a situation. Each time I get a new puzzle, I write a number on the box and then write that number on the back of each piece. Then, say when I find two random puzzle pieces mysteriously stuffed into the only VCR left in our house, I can quickly determine which boxes to return them to. Now if only fixing the VCR was that easy!
