5 year old hitting

Taking away privileges and the bold step work in our house when our 4 year old or 2 year old are playing up. 1 minute per year of age an apology, and the loss of a treat or cartoons and soon enough they get the message. Its important to let them test their boundaries every now and again but bad behaviour can't be tolerated or its to hard to get them back in line again.

Good luck with it, the longest my 2 year old lasted one night was 1.5 hours... he slapped me and pure stubborness kept him there, needless to say i had a pain in my rear going to the stairs every 2 minutes but it works.. now i just have to ask when they start up if they want to go to the bold step.. Serious bad behaviour and they get put to bed.. no matter how inconvenient it nips it in the bud.

There are a couple of points I’d bring up.

First of all, have you noticed anything that triggers the change from best friend to bad language and hitting ?? if there is something then look at how that can be changed – For example, if you’re playing away and it comes time to clean up tell your son that you’ll have to clean up in 5 minutes because you have to do something else but when that’s done you can play again. If that kicks off a tantrum then tell him that if he doesn’t then he can’t play afterwards. The point here is that there are consequences for bad behaviour – even small ones. I have a 6 year old our main battles are over dinner – she’ll like something one day and next week tell me she doesn’t like it and my reply to this is “that’s fine, you can leave your dinner but there’ll be no treats (3/4 jellies) afterwards” – this usually changes her tune cause she knows I won’t give them to her.

As for the hitting – you need to nip that in the bud immediately IMO !! I think there is nothing worse than seeing a child hit it’s mother or father !! The next time it happens, I’d put him down, tell him that you will not tolerate it and send him to the naughty corner /step telling him he can come back when he’s prepared to apologise. And I would stick to my guns – you really need to be consistent cause children are so clever – they know exactly what they can and can’t get away with.

The same would go for the bad language – tell your son that it’s not allowed and watch your own language too. You can’t really tell a child not to be swearing if you’re at it yourself

I know that there was none of this naughty corner business when most of us were kids and that’s ok – our parents used the tools that they had to discipline us. Times have moved on though and just cause it was ok for us doesn’t necessarily mean it’s best practice these days. I believe having consequences for bad behaviour is important as well as praising (not necessarily rewarding) good behaviour. It can be a daily struggle but I firmly believe that putting in the groundwork with discipline and respect now will pay off in the long run - or at least that’s what I’m hoping !!!