The girl who helps me two hours a week came with her husband and two year old son Charly.
As soon as he gets out of his car seat, he makes a bee-line for my husband's golf cart. He twists the key, and then sits on the accelerator. 20 feet and BAM !! Right into the two open doors. He's not hurt, because he was sitting (on the accelerator, which makes the cart want to continue to move!) but the cart shoves the back door into the front door, both of which are now inoperable. Charly is screaming his head off, and beating the cart with his fists - total melt down. Mom picks him up, and brings him into the house, where he can't see the car or the cart. Dad has been working part time with a friend at a collision center, so he knows what he's doing. While Mom is soothing the kid, Dad takes the back door off, and is working with the tools that we have on hand to straighten the hinges so the door will close - almost. In order to open the back door, the front door has to be open. Crazy. Dad will find a new door, and install it - hopefully next week.
While Dad is working on the door, Charly has been put in time-out in his portable crib, so Mom can do her work. Surprise! Charly can climb out of the crib! He's going around, opening all the cabinet doors and SLAMMING them shut. Maybe he wants to replicate the sound of the golf cart hitting the car.
Mom finishes her work, and is waiting for Dad to finish with the car door, and Charly is throwing everything out of the crib - his bottle, all the toys, books, etc. He has no concept of what the word "no" means.
They're packing up, put Charly in his car seat, and he starts screaming at the top of his lungs - he doesn't want to be confined. Mom and Dad are both trying to quiet him down, but he's not having any of it. I'll say one thing - that boy will never have a problem with his lungs - he can scream so loud people in the cars next to us keep looking at us as if we're torturing the boy, and we had the windows closed. It's a 45 minute drive to their house, and he never stopped screaming the whole time. DH rewarded me with a nice glass of wine when I finally got home.
Have any of you dealt with a "screamer"? How did you handle it?
Does he scream all the time or just this one time? Possibly over stimulated maybe. When my kids at that age threw a temper tantrum because they didn’t get their way I put them in their timeout corner and ignored them, if it’s over being overstimulated I would hold them walk them around and talk soothingly. Twos and threes are challenging.
He screams ALL THE TIME ! For no reason at all. He's been checked for hearing loss (none). Being held makes no difference. Being ignored makes no difference. He knows how to say certain words, in a normal tone, so the screaming seems to be a matter of choice.
Oh dear, I’m sure his parents had him checked by his pediatrician as well. He may just be a screamer. Hopefully he gets bored with it soon Twos and threes can be an exhausting time as well as adorable. My just turned three year old granddaughter likes to pick on her big brother’s. She has definitely developed a sassy attitude.
Oh goodness. The terrible twos and threenager stages sucked with DS. He was a ball of attitude and sure thought he was the king of the castle. He threw some epic tantrums. Once he got to the point where he really hated being mimicked, I used that to squash his public tantrums. He'd start up and I'd join right in. Once, he informed me in a rather sour tone that I was embarrassing him. Oh, really? I was just copying what you're doing. It can't be all that embarrassing if you're doing it. He didn't like that and tantrums faded out after that day.
He'll be 10 in December and is now in the surly preteen phase. He's back to having tantrums but now they're what I call anger fits. He'll get mad and scream at DH and I about whatever then slam stuff around his room. It royally pisses him off when he breaks something dear to him and we just shrug. Well, child, actions have consequences and anger is toxic. We know the cause of his malfunction. We just don't know how to fix it. He has issues understanding that real life is more important than screens and freaks out when he's disallowed from having screen time.
My #1 had difficulty with changes to his routine/schedule. If he was working on something, he needed to finish it before moving on to something else or some place else. If not, total meltdown. He also had trouble leaving places, whether it was a birthday party, or preschool, especially if he were in the middle of something-Lego building, etc. He had to complete his task first. I learned to be patient and allow the extra time for him to complete his assignments, or give him plenty of notice that we would be leaving soon so he could process and prepare himself. Come to find out, at age 13 he was diagnosed as being on the autism spectrum.
#1 would get over stimulated a lot, too, but that didn't really occur until he was older. Possibly because when he was 2, I was more aware of stimulation and tried to keep it to a minimum.
