3 Year Old Behavior

Kicking and screaming, whining and crying, stomping around, floor pounding, arm flapping... all things you may be experiencing with your toddler right now, and its tough. Your child is throwing a temper tantrum and these are hard to cope with. Here are some things you can do to cope with your 3 year old behavior, and keep your sanity.

1. Remember, tantrums are your child's way of expressing their displeasure with a particular situation or thing.
2. Bad behavior can be an effort on your child's part to get your attention.
3. Are your expectations of your child too high, and thus causing frustration on their part?

After spending a lot of time reading about the subject of out of control children, I have found that what I am going to tell you makes a lot of sense from a scientific viewpoint. Sometimes your child can be difficult, defiant, uncooperative, and basically, drive you crazy. What causes that behavior? Well studies have shown that brain chemistry is a huge factor on why your child misbehaves.

What do I mean specifically? Well I am talking about a hormone that gets released in our bodies called Cortisol. Studies have shown that lower cortisol levels in a person's brain
Higher cortisol levels cause children to become hyperactive, defiant, annoying, whiny and much more. If levels are allowed to remain high, it can even be a factor in teenage delinquency later in life. Simply put, when cortisol levels go down, children will generally be calmer, happy and cooperative.

So the best discipline in the world is discipline without punishment or fear. Fear causes the fight or flight reaction. This then allows a surge of hormones into the body. One of the main hormones released is cortisol and the end result is an increase of cortisol on the brain. The end result is that misbehavior continues to come back: meltdowns, tantrums, backtalking etc, becomes worse. Therefore, discipline without punishment and rewards keeps cortisol levels from going up because it eliminates fear.... fear of punishment or fear of not getting reward.

Fear causes the fight or flight reaction, which is a surge of hormones in the body that give your child a rush of energy. Cortisol is one of the main hormones released during that reaction. Without taking the necessary steps to reduce the cortisol levels in the brain, punishments and rewards won't even work. Your child's bad behavior will only get worse. They are one of the biggest time wasters and least effective ways to get your child to behave.

1. Realize that you are surrounded by parents who discipline their child the wrong way. Timeouts and raising your voice do not work. They only make your child'ss problems worse.

2. Despite what you hear, children don't act out to try to spite you. Instead, there is a reason for their misbehavior and you simply need to understand what the real problem is. They typically fall into 3 categories:
a. Your child has a legitimate need
b. Your child is stressed and this is causing a cortisol build up in the brain, which in turn makes sure they can't think clearly
c. Your child simply needs more education that their current behavior is undesirable

3. Your child's misbehavior is not always caused by stress, so if you don't know what the cause of the misbehavior is, you will only frustrate your child, and the behavior will not improve. You have to get to the root of the problem. Think of it this way:

Fruit tree, gives bad fruit. The smart thing would be to fertilize the roots of the tree to help it. But instead, you go and buy fruit and hang it on the tree to fix it. That is not fixing the root of the problem...you need to establish respect and trust.
Defiance and not listening = fruit
Root = disrespect

If you can treat the root of the problem, the tree will bear more desirable fruit.

"The Happy Child Guide" takes years of practice and research, and has developed a simple guide to stopping undesirable behavior in children. And it all starts with you, the parent. You are the key. This program will help you to discover stress free parenting techniques and help you to raise happy and cooperative children.