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I leave my 3 year old son at a daycare. I get regular complaints that he is very aggressive and possessive. He does not share his toys with anyone and hits whoever comes to take them from him.

Please help me this problem for he will be joining school shortly. He is our only child.
 

Kelly Answers: If these are his toys that he is bringing into the daycare, the answer is simple. Don't allow him to take toys anymore. Explain to him that it isn't fair or kind to not share his toys with others, so he must leave them at home.

If these are the toys that belong to the daycare, you will need to work out a response with them. How does the daycare respond to his behavior? Hopefully there is good supervision and someone seeing to it that play areas are fair to everyone.

I have a friend who received a note from her child's daycare regarding some poor behavior. She felt badly about it and gave her son a firm talking to and promised severe consequences if the behavior repeated. Of course, it repeated. She received another note from the daycare and she followed up with the consequences she had promised. And it repeated again. She was very upset. I told her simply that for young children, consequences need to come quickly and be practical. Her son just wasn't connecting the discipline to the misbehavior very well. As it turned out, the daycare was not applying any discipline to the action other than to write the note to Mom! Is it any wonder that a very young child would think that they could go ahead and repeat the behavior? How much better it would have been if the daycare authority had dealt with his behavior firmly AND wrote the note to Mom.

Remembering my daycare days, if I had a child that was unwilling to share, I simply intervened and required equal time to be given for every interested child. If a special toy was a huge sharing problem, I just removed the toy, explaining that if they cannot share, then noone will enjoy it for awhile.

Onto the issue of hitting. At three years of age, your son is ready to be held accountable for his actions. Hitting others is wrong, plain and simple. If you have not already had some good talks about this, now is the time. Sit him down and tell him that you will not allow him to hit others any longer. Give him a clear consequence for hitting. If you use spankings as a discipline, you may want to use it in these situations. If you do not spank, be sure to select your firmest discipline. Let him know that you take it very seriously.

I had a child in my daycare who had developed a potty mouth. I was dealing with it with time outs but it wasn't stopping. He was in school days and his mother worked nights and by the time she picked him up, he was asleep. So she asked me to phone her when I had it come up. So we did. When the child swore the next time I took him into the kitchen to call his Mom and tell her about it. This only had to happen twice and it was taken care of.

Talk with your daycare provider and work out a plan for responding to the behavior that you are both comfortable with.

When your son makes it through the day being kinder to his playmates, be sure to notice and reward this good behavior!

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