Oh, this sounds so familiar!
The troublewith discipline, is we tend to apply what was used on us, and maybe for us it was OK, but if your child is at all out of the ordinary, you need to do something different.
For a lot of us, the discipline we grew up with was about control, it wasabout the adult imposing will on the child. And yes, it works - as long as you're not trying to teach achild who has a strong need to control his environment, coupledd with a strong sense of justice and fairness, coupled with a total lack of awareness of difference between adult and child. Because when you thank you to conntrol such a child by force of will, you find two things:
1) to the child, it seems like bullying, and you are doing it so it must be OK to do it back; and
2) they are stronger than you, more stubborn than you, more determined than you. If not now, then soon.
There are other ways but it requires a mental turnaround to find something more effective and perhaps more appropriate. A lot of us have found benefit from "The Explosive Child" by Ross Greene. There are other books but tis is a good one to start with. There issome discussion on this book in the Early Childhood forum, for a quick preview.
So your chid plays computer games obsessively? Oh, is this ever familiar! I have two sons like this, one is now a marriedadult and the other is now in his teens.
I went down the route of trying to limit game play. NOT a good idea.In fact, don't try to do anything, unless oyu can engage the child in the reasonableness of your actions. And trying to totally ban video games is likely to be disastrous.
Pleez_help, this is for you as well - go carefully with what you have been advised.
Our experience - yes, there were some games which made difficult child 3 worse. RThose games, we banned until difficult child 3 could demonstrate to us that playing those games was not going to lead to increased behaviour problems. For example, one game in particular would give him nightmares. So at first it was a total ban, then he was permitted to play it on weekends in the mornings only, then when he was nightmare-free we would let him try later and later in the day, until he was OK with these games.
Other limits we were able to successfully impose - no stimulating games after a certain time. PLus, ALL gaming to stop by acertain time, in order for him to wind down for bed and complete his evening routine without disrution.
But banning all gaming? Disastrous.
The reason I think this is so disastrous - for these kids, gaming is often acoping strategy. It calms them down when they're agitated (depending on what game they're playing; younger kids have more trouble with some games and do need to be supported to play calming games at times when they need to calm down). It gives them useful social information, often practical knowledge and general reflex skills training. Logic training, brain training, it uses mental energy which other wise runs riot.
The rules we had in place -
1) School work during school hours. No gaming during school hours. Ever. Not even if he's home sick.
2) Non-stimulating games at wind-down times. Examples of non-stimulating games - it varies from child to child, you have to observe. If a game is not time-limited but still causes the child to get angry and agitated, it comes off the "safe" list. Otherwise, a lot of educational software that allows unlimited time to answer questions, is OK for wind-down. And yes, they can be played during school hours, when all other assigned schoolwork hs been done. But it is a privilege.
3) Stimulating games can only be played if/when it can be shown to not disrupt the child's behaviour subsequently. Therefore it is in the child's interests to demonstrate this; if they fail, they can reapply in a week, a fortnight, a month. YOu set the rules with your child's involvement in the decision.
4) You respect the child's need to either save the game or get to a logical pause point. In return, the child has to accept that certain chores must be done (such as eating dinner, doing homework, bathing, getting ready for bed). NEVER expect instant compliance for anything; instead, give time arnings such as, "Dinner will be ready in ten minutes. Get yourself to a save point, or pause the game." Never expect the child to stop the game instantly you call. This is a transition problem and is a very common cause of fighting with even avery young child. Some kids just can't transition well and will fdight, often seemingly unreasonably, when you expect them to. We then rspond with instant requirement of compliance to parental authority, and then set ourselves up for failure especially if we have a child who doesn't recognise any authority but his own.
The more you stand there and deemand instant compliance, the more you will see oppositional behaviour. We all would do it, if our brains were wired like these children.
Imagine yourself in a work environment. You have been given the task to straighten out the files which have been left in a mess. Incoming mail has been filed with copies of outgoing mail, it's all out of chronological order, accounts have been filed with orders and none of it makes sense. A lot of it is crumpled.
You are in the middle of mentally sifting through the alphabet and the calendr, to try to work out which particular file you should use for the papers you currently have in your right hand, while in your left you hold duplicate copies which can now be discarded.
At that moment your boss walks up and says, "Drop everything. There's a birthday cake and presentation happening for Margot in my office NOW."
If you instantly drop everything, you will have to dift trough the entire contents of your desk to get back to what you were doing, and the last half hour of work, possibly more, will need to be re-done. YOu say to your boss, "I need ten minutes, I can't drop everything right now."
From your point of view, a reasonable boss would know what you are dealing with and would make allowances. But to your horror, your boss plucks the papers from your hands, drops them ALL in the bin (where many other papers already thoroughly checked and rejected, are now mixed in with papers that could be important) and grabs you by your collar and says, "When I say 'now', I means NOW!"
How would you react? And how would you rect if you got to the boss's office and found you had to wait for another ten minutes because others weren't ready? And the boss didn't make the same fuss over them not being ready?
For our difficult children, the world (and our part in it) seems at times to be very unreasonable. They have no good example of how to handle this other than standing there screaming at us (often because that is what has been modelled for them by other adults in their environment). Even when we as parents model quiet reason instead of shouting at them for compliance, they often, at 5, don't have the ability to cope with frustration well enough to not go into meltdown mode.
For a young child who is used to playing games, suddenly stopping them is going to seem like an adult imposing force of will purely because they can. It will teach absolutely nothing, other than "if you're big enough, you get to have your own way."
However, if you say to your child, "I find that when you play THIS game, it makes you angry. I think it's too complicated for you and I don't like it when you're angry. How can we make this alright?"
The child's initial reaction is likely to be panic. "They want me to stop all video games forever."
So ANY compromise from there, is likely to be an improvement. If you say, "Here is a list of games I thinnk are OK to play any time. And here is al iist I don't want you to play at all for the next week. Let's try this out and see how you feel and how you manage your frustration, over the next week."
For a five year old, you might need to impose this for just one day.
This can work, even with a young child. But you need to find ways to help the child feel ownership of the choices, otherwise it's just you imposing your will and the end result is no lesson learned, just you modifying your environment.
You are really winning, and really teaching your child, when he comes to you and says, "I was playing that game for the first time for a week and I started to get angry, so I turned it off and walked away."
THat will take some times, but he needs you to lead him to this and not push him.
When you involve your own child like this, it is not all going to go the way you want it to. You will be compromising. But in the process, you are teaching your child to compromise - a vitally important lesson and quite a sophisticated one for a young child.
As thigns are right now, he is trying to impose his will on you, because that is all he knows. Ands it's not working for either of you.
Of course, all I'm suggesting here says not a word about WHY your child is like this. That is a separate issue that we can also support you through. It takes time, and frankly you can't wait until you have those answers, to put something in place. You need to change your discipline NOW in order to begin to make some headway and preserve your sanity!
Please be aware - I am not in any way criticising you as a parent. Your discipline methods are undoubtedly the best, they are what you know, they probably would be ideal for most kids. But they're not working for THIS kid, and that is what matters here.
There are methods that work. It's not fair, to have to change your tactics, but someone has to. Generally the parent has more flexibility in this, than the child. So it is the parent who has to be the hero, and make the necessary change.
I hope this can help.
There is more, but I don't want to overwhelm you to begin with.
Welcome to the mob, help is here. And understanding.
Marg
