Reply to Advice- 5 yr old shuts down

Forum Index » General Parenting Discussion

Reply to "Advice- 5 yr old shuts down"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous]My kid isn’t exactly like yours, but she does go off on her own when she’s upset (as do I, so I totally understand it). I try to be as supportive as possible. I’ll ask if she wants to leave and give her the space she needs.

If he’s pushing kids away, they need to learn to leave him alone. You can very kindly tell them he wants some alone time and redirect them to something else. “Larlo wants to be alone right now, let’s go over here. Do you ever like to be alone? When do you like to be alone?” etc. Try to get to them before the pushing starts, because it’s not really fair to punish him when other people aren’t respecting his boundaries and he’s communicating the only way he knows how.

If he’s running too far away, tell him kindly that you support him in being alone, but he can’t go past the end of the playground (or wherever - just make it very clear where he can’t go, instead of something like “stay where I can see you”. He has no idea what you can and can’t see). You can also give him a specific area to go - “let’s set you up under this tree and you can be alone here. I’ll keep the other kids away from you”.

My kid needs time to process things before talking about it (I’m the same way), so we talk when she’s ready to. Often she’ll bring it up hours later or the next day and we identify her feelings, I’ll tell her about a time I felt the same way, I listen, and sometimes we’ll come up with ways to handle it next time. Sometimes she just needs to vent and know someone is on her team, and that’s okay, we don’t always need to solve the problem.

We’ve used the book and the game The Color Monster, which helps. The game is pretty awesome because it’s about identifying feelings and is cooperative, not competitive. We also watch the movie Inside Out so we have colors for all the feelings. I have other books I can recommend if you’re interested. [/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics