Two Year Old Being Intentionally Disobedient
I have a two year old who is occasionally intentionally disobedient. She's quite well developed for her age and understands instructions given. But at the dinner table she is often quite disobedient, particularly with throwing food around.
Usually what will happen is that she will grow bored with her dinner and pick up a piece of vegetable and throw it across the table. We will tell her not to do that and in an act of defiance she'll pick another piece up, look straight at us, smile, and then throw the new piece of food, as if to say "what are you going to do about it"?
We have tried time-out discipline and also threaten to not give her dessert (which is a threat we have followed up with on a number of occasions).
What else can we try and why is she doing this?
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What's come up for me again and again is that, to change behavior, you have to see what the kid is doing, not what they're not doing. That's kind of a glib way to put it, since the problem you see is her "defying" you, but at 2, that's not really a thing they do. What I'm getting at, though, is, to change a behavior, you have to offer an alternate behavior. At 2, she may well only be able to know she's in trouble, not why, much less how to come up with something better to do. Same with withholding dessert. That has the double-whammy of being a punishment but it not being clear what (to her mind) and being removed in time from the event. Additionally, I don't love the no-dessert punishment because you also want her to be able to eat dinner without expecting that she'll have dessert every day unless she's in trouble.
I have two suggestions. First, what we did when our kids went through this is to put a napkin on the table and say that all food they didn't want should go on the napkin. If they dropped food, we'd pick it up and say, "It goes on the napkin," and put it there ourselves. If they picked up food and seemed to hesitate, we'd jump in and point to the napkin saying, "Remember, put your food on the napkin!" Eventually, it all went on the napkin and never on the floor. It will happen!
Second, and this is more for you, remember that, especially at her age, all lessons are a long game. She's not going to change in a day, much less a meal--in all likelihood, she won't change for multiple weeks. She really isn't cognitively capable of understanding that what you're telling her is wrong is going to be wrong every time. Think about what you want her to do and tell (and show) her how to do that, then be as consistent as you can. If you do that, she can build a habit, whereas if you focus on punishments, she will eventually learn what it is she's doing that is wrong, but she'll still struggle for a long time with the forethought and willpower to actually not do the wrong thing.
Oh, and one of my biggest problems with punishments is, depending on the kid, sometimes it's not long at all before they figure out that they can choose to do what they want and take the punishment. Some don't, but there are plenty of kids who, as they get older will just say, "I don't need dessert," or "I'll just play my game another time," because a punishment is basically giving them two choices, except you get mad if they take one choice over the other. I try to give my kids choices as much as I can, except I never give them a choice where one option isn't actually okay. That just pisses them off that you're being unfair, taking the focus off the behavior you want to correct and putting it on your behavior.
TL;DR: Children want boundaries. Help them self-regulate their behavior by making it a fun game involving points or a scoring system.
Why is she doing this?
Children need boundaries to feel secure.
The behavior you describe is your child requesting that you set her boundaries. At various points during their development, children will request boundaries in order to:
know they exist
discover exactly where they are and
find out what will happen if they cross them.
Boundaries are like a psychological safety net for children. They want boundaries and need boundaries to feel secure and grow properly.
As a parent, it is your job to establish these boundaries and enforce them.
What else can we try?
I can tell you two very effective techniques I began when my children were slightly older than yours. Both involve turning their behavior self-management into a type of game.
Behavior Meter
The first thing I did was the behavior meter. Basically, this was my thumb pointing an angle (up, down or in between). When my thumb pointed straight up, it meant their behavior was perfect. When it pointed straight down it meant their behavior was unacceptable and immediate consequences and corrective measures would always follow. In between was their signal to self-regulate.
When I first started it, the children could understand by my facial expressions and tone what the calibration was. Whenever their behavior would begin to slip, I would pull out my thumb and point it at whatever angle was corresponding to their behavior. Usually, this would be some angle just slightly off of vertical because I would do it quickly to give their self-management skills time to kick in before they got out of hand.
Their goal was to instinctively prevent the thumb from going down and to get it back up to straight up vertical as quickly as possible. This helped give them real time feedback without waiting until the behavior got so bad a punishment was necessary. They could self-regulate more effectively. It worked great.
Smart Kid Points
The second thing I did was to start smart kid points. Every time they did something good (or smart) I gave them smart kid points. Because let's face it, everyone enjoys earning points. It's fun! For some reason humans seem universally programmed to want to earn points and no amount of points is ever enough. So I used this fact to my/our advantage.
Then when they asked if they could have something for Christmas I would check how many points they had then it would become a reward based system. I actually wrote down the points on a spreadsheet so I could show them how many they had whenever they asked.
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