Reply to Currently on a miserable beach vacation with 4 yo

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[quote=Anonymous]Another parent of a difficult child (there are so many of us). The way we handled trips was building in structure, letting go of expectations and making safety a high priority.

For structure, we’d take a whiteboard and write out the schedule in detail (down to bathroom breaks) every single day. If we deviated, we’d change the whiteboard. Even before kid could read, the knowledge that a plan existed worked wonders. We’d make the day into what most made kid happy. We’d recognize that we were going to be carrying a screaming kid off the beach and just plan for it because that was our life. I also had no issue with holding mine down to brush his teeth and I would have done the same for sunscreen. I never even offered a different option because I either held him down or it didn’t happen so why pretend we’re something we’re not. We rarely even tried restaurants because it wasn’t something that would work and we’d just be disrupting other guests while being miserable ourselves. In your case I’d definitely get a leash for safety.

One thing we did do was that we started our still existing practice of letting every family member choose some activity which we dubbed their “adventure”. Everyone had to participate and no one could complain.  As parents we often choose what difficult kid would be happy doing because success was important. I share this because this has made our trips together so much more satisfying over the years and we started it during very difficult times and made it work.

I hope the rest of your trip is more peaceful and that later you can look back at pictures of the amazing parts of the trip and find yourself glad that you had those moments. [/quote]

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