Reply to FTM Question about Forcing a Toddler to Get Dressed

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Reply to "FTM Question about Forcing a Toddler to Get Dressed"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Well, it's never good to make someone cry. :)

You have to try lots of different approaches to figure out what works for her. For one of my kids it was reverse psychology. "I bet you can't get dressed without help. I bet you can't get dressed before I do." etc. For another one of my kids, I made up a story about the clothing fairy who came each night while she was sleeping and would leave an outfit for the next day. I would even use a bow and everything some days. [/quote]

That sounds crazy.  I'm sorry, you sound like a great mom, but that is just wayyyyy above what I would do.  My approach is more like, you need to get dressed, we're getting dressed, let's go.

Around that age, tooth brushing became a huge battle.  The advice here was to make it a game, "Open your mouth, do you see a monkey in there?  Let's get the monkey!"  Well, that meant brushing his teeth became this long, drawn-out, affair.  It was taking forever and required so much fake enthusiasm from me, it just was not sustainable.  So when it was time to brush his teeth, I was done with playing, and just pinned him down and brushed his teeth.  He screamed, he cried, but after a few days of that, he just calmly opened his mouth when I needed to brush his teeth.  And it was never a battle again.

The good thing about kids is that they change constantly, so no annoying habit will last forever.  (Periods of good behavior don't last forever, either!)  Just get the kid dressed, in whatever way you can, and before long, she will have moved on to the next thing to test you.[/quote]

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