new to this forum!

hi! we are one! i survived!

okay, on to my concern. ivana has been pretty brutal about stealing toys from marina, to where she pulls her shirt or hair, or claws at her face. but the last few days she's been hitting dh or myself, as well (if we try to intervene). at a year old, how can i stop this? :unsure:

 

Mia started hitting a little bit around 1. Usually she was smiling and thought it was f unny, but repeated it when we told her "we do not hit". This is around the time that we started doing time outs... They get one warning, then a 3 count, then time out.

 

At that age, I had a few responses (sometimes used separately, sometimes together).

For toy-stealing, prevention and distraction are the best bets. A one-year-old can't even really understand that she is stealing a toy from a person, so there is no point (IMO) trying to discipline her for it or teach her not to do it. For prevention, try having them play in separate areas of the room. Keep an eye out for impending theft, and quickly either move her away or hand her something else to play with. Don't let her keep the toys she steals, because you don't want her to learn that she can get what she wants that way.

For hitting, I used removal. If she hit her sister, I would move her away from her sister. If she hit me, I would say "OW" (not too loudly -- that scared them) and set her down just for a second and walk away. She needs to learn that if she hits mommy, mommy goes away. Above all, what she wants is to be close to mommy (or daddy), so this is a pretty strong motivator.

 

For toy stealing, we'd try to catch it before it happened. If not, we would give back the toy and tell the thief that he has to share and that Bubba wasn't done with the toy. Don't allow them to keep the toy...if we have a major meltdown from everybody, I just put it away.

They now will pick up two toys and automatically give one to brother...very cute.

Hitting is becoming quite popular in my house nowadays. We firmly say "no hitting" and if they persist, I remove the hitter, give attention to the one who was hit, and do a short 1.5 minute time out with the hitter. If I get hit, I do like pp and said and say "ow, you hurt mama" and then they kind of look at me strange and stop. Not sure why but that's worked so far.